Title: St Francis of Assisi
Author: G K Chesterton
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: St Francis of Assisi
Author: G K Chesterton
First published 1923
* * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM OF ST. FRANCIS
CHAPTER II THE WORLD ST. FRANCIS FOUND
CHAPTER III FRANCIS THE FIGHTER
CHAPTER IV FRANCIS THE BUILDER
CHAPTER V LE JONGLEUR DE DIEU
CHAPTER VI THE LITTLE POOR MAN
CHAPTER VII THE THREE ORDERS
CHAPTER III THE MIRROR OF CHRIST
CHAPTER IX MIRACLES AND DEATH
CHAPTER X THE TESTAMENT OF ST. FRANCIS
* * *
CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM OF ST. FRANCIS
A sketch of St. Francis of Assisi in modern English may be written in
one of three ways. Between these the writer must make his selection; and
the third way, which is adopted here, is in some respects the most
difficult of all. At least, it would be the most difficult if the other
two were not impossible.
First, he may deal with this great and most amazing man as a figure in
secular history and a model of social virtues. He may describe this
divine demagogue as being, as he probably was, the world's one quite
sincere democrat. He may say (what means very little) that St. Francis
was in advance of his age. He may say (what is quite true) that St.
Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the
modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of
social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and
even of property. All those things that nobody understood before
Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All those things that were
first discovered by Tolstoy could have been taken for granted by St
Francis. He could be presented, not only as a human but a humanitarian
hero; indeed as the first hero of humanism. He has been described as a
sort of morning star of the Renaissance. And in comparison with all
these things, his ascetical theology can be ignored or dismissed as a
contempory accident, which was fortunately not a fatal accident. His
religion can be regarded as a superstition, but an inevitable
superstition, from which not even genius could wholly free itself; in
the consideration of which it would be unjust to condemn St. Francis for
his self denial or unduly chide him for his chastity. It is quite true
that even from so detached a standpoint his stature would still appear
heroic. There would still be a great deal to be said about the man who
tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens or who interceded
with the Emporer for the birds. The writer might describe in a purely
historical spirit the whole of the Franciscan inspiration that was felt
in the painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in the miracle plays
that made possible the modern drama, and in so many things that are
already appreciated by the modern culture. He may try to do it, as
others have done, almost without raising any religious question at all.
In short, he may try to tell the story of a saint without God; which is
like being told to write the life of Nansen and forbidden to mention the
North Pole.
Second, he may go to the opposite extreme, and decide, as it were, to be
defiantly devotional. He may make the theological enthusiasm as
thoroughly the theme as it was the theme of the first Franciscans. He
may treat religion as the real thing that it was to the real Francis of
Assisi. He can find an austere joy, so to speak, in parading the
paradoxes of asceticism and all the topsy-turveydom of humility. He can
stamp the whole history with the Stigmata, record fasts like fights
against a dragon; till in the vague modern mind St Francis is as dark a
figure as St. Dominic. In short, he can produce what many in our world
will regard as a sort of photographic negative; the reversal of all
lights and shades; what the foolish will find as impenetrable as
darkness and even many of the wise will find almost as invisible as if
it were written in silver upon white. Such a study of St. Francis would
be unintelligible to anyone who does not share his religion, perhaps
only partly intelligible to anyone who does not share his vocation.
According to degrees of judgement, it will be regarded as something too
bad or too good for the world. The only difficulty about doing the thing
in this way is that it cannot be done. It would really require a saint
to write about the life of a saint. In the present case the objections
to such a course are insuperable.
Third, he may try to do what I have tried to do here; and as I have
already suggested, the course has peculiar problems of its own. The
writer may put himself in the position of the ordinary modern outsider
and enquirer; as indeed the present writer is still largely and was once
entirely in that position. He may start from the standpoint of a man who
already admires St. Francis, but only for those things which such a man
finds admirable. In other words he may assume that the reader is at
least as enlightened as Renan or Matthew Arnold; but in the light of
that enlightenment he may try to illimunate what Renan and Matthew
Arnold left dark. He may try to use what is understood to explain what
is not understood. He may try to say to the modern English reader: "Here
is an historical character which is admittedly attractive to many of us
already, by its gaiety, its romantic imagination, its spiritual courtesy
and cameraderie, but which also contains elements (evidently equally
sincere and emphatic) which seem to you quite remote and repulsive. But
after all, this man was a man and not half a dozen men. What seems
inconsistency to you did not seem inconsistency to him. Let us see
whether we can understand, with the help of the existing understanding,
these other things that now seem to be doubly dark, by their intrinsic
gloom and their ironic contrast." I do not mean, of course, that I can
really reach a psychological completeness in this crude and curt
outline. But I mean that this is the only controversial condition that I
shall here assume; that I am dealing with the sympathetic outsider. I
shall not assume any more or any less agreement than this. A materialist
may not care whether the inconsistencies are reconciled or not. A
Catholic may not see any inconsistencies to reconcile. But I am here
addressing the ordinary common man, sympathetic but sceptical, and I can
only rather hazily hope that, by approaching the great saint's story
through what is evidently picturesque and popular about it, I may at
least leave the reader understanding a little more than he did before of
the consistency of a complete character; that by approaching it in this
way, we may at least get a glimmering of why the poet who praised his
lord the sun, often hid himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint who
was so gentle with his Brother the Wolf was so harsh to his Brother the
Ass (as he nicknamed his own body), of why the troubadour who said that
love set his heart on fire separated himself from women, of why the
singer who rejoiced in the strength and gaiety of the fire deliberately
rolled himself in the snow, of why the very song which cries with all
the passion of a pagan, "Praised be God for our Sister, Mother Earth,
which brings forth varied fruits and grass and glowing flowers," ends
almost with the words "Praised be God for our Sister, the death of the
body."
Renan and Matthew Arnold failed utterly at this test. They were content
to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped by their
prejudices; the stubborn prejudices of the sceptic. The moment Francis
began to do something they did not understand or did not like, they did
not try to understand, still less to like it; they simply turned their
backs on the whole business and "walked no more with him." No man will
get any further along a path of historical enquiry in that fashion.
These skeptics are really driven to drop the whole subject in despair,
to leave the most simple and sincere of all historical characters as a
mass of contradiction, to be praised on the principle of the curate's
egg. Arnold refers to the asceticism of Alverno almost hurriedly, as if
it were an unlucky but undeniable blot on the beauty of the story; or
rather as if it were a pitiable break-down and bathos at the end of
story. Now this is simply to be stone-blind to the whole point of any
story. To represent Mount Alverno as the mere collapse of Francis is
exactly like representing Mount Calvary as the mere collapse of Christ.
Those mountains are mountains, whatever else they are, and it is
nonsense to say (like the Red Queen) that they are comparitive hollows
or negative holes in the ground. They were quite manifestly meant to be
culminations and landmarks. To treat the Stigmata as a sort of scandal,
to be touched on tenderly but with pain, is exactly like treating the
original five wounds of Jesus Christ as five blots on his character. You
may dislike the idea of asceticism; you may dislike equally the idea of
martyrdom; for that matter you may have an honest and natural dislike of
the whole conception of sacrifice symbolised by the cross. But if it is
an intelligent dislike, you will retain the capacity for seeing the
point of the story; the story of a martyr or even the story of a monk.
You will not be able rationally to read the Gospel and regard the
Crucifixion as an afterthought or an anti-climax or an accident in the
life of Christ; it is obviously the point of the story like the point of
a sword, the sword that pierced the heart of the Mother of God.
And you will not be able rationally to read the story of a man presented
as a Mirror of Christ without understanding his final phase as a Man of
Sorrows, and at least artistically appreciating the appropriatness of
his receiving, in a cloud of mystery and isolation, inflicted by no
human hand, the unhealed everlasting wounds that heal the world.
The practical reconciliation of the gaiety and austerity I must leave
the story itself to suggest. But since I have mentioned Matthew Arnold
and Renan and the rationalistic admirers of St. Francis, I will here
give a hint of what it seems to me most advisable for such readers to
keep in mind. These distinguished writers found things like the Stigmata
a stumbling block because to them a religion was a philosophy. It was an
impersonal thing; and it is only the most personal passion that provides
here an approximate earthly parallel. A man will not roll in the snow
for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their
being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not
ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or
pretty like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these
things when he is in love. The first fact to realise about St Francis is
involved with the first fact with which his story starts; that when he
said from the first that he was a Troubadour, and said later that he was
a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not using a mere
metaphor, but understood himself much better than the scholars
understand him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour.
He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a
lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men is
very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the
Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist
may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did not love
humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ. Say, if
you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person; but an
imaginary person, not an imaginary idea. And for the modern reader the
clue to the asceticism and all the rest can be found in the stories of
lovers when they seemed to be rather like lunatics. Tell it as the tale
of one of the Troubadours, and the wild things he would do for his lady,
and the whole of the modern puzzle disappears. In such a romance there
would be no contradiction between the poet gathering flowers in the sun
and enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, between his praising all
earthly and bodily beauty and then refusing to eat, and between his
glorifying gold and purple and perversely going in rags, between his
showing pathetically a hunger for a happy life and a thirst for a heroic
death. All these riddles would be easily be resolved in the simplicity
of any noble love; only this was so noble a love that nine out of ten
men have hardly even heard of it. We shall see later that this parallel
of the earthly lover has a very practical relation to the problems of
his life, as to his relations with his father and his friends and their
families. The modern reader will almost always find that if he could
only find this kind of love as a reality, he could feel this kind of
extravagance as a romance. But I only note it here as a preliminary
point because, though it is very far from being the final truth in the
matter, it is the best approach to it. The reader cannot even begin to
see the sense of a story that may well seem to him a very wild one,
until he understands that to this great mystic his religion was not a
thing like a theory but a thing like a love affair. And the only purpose
of this prefatory chapter is to explain the limits of the present book;
which is only addressed to that part of the modern world which finds in
St. Francis a certain modern difficulty; which can admire him yet hardly
accept him, or which can appreciate the saint almost without the
sanctity. And my only claim even to attempt such a task is that I myself
have for so long been in various stages of such a condition. Many
thousand things that I now partly comprehend I should have thought
utterly incomprehensible, many things I now hold sacred I should have
scouted as utterly superstitious, many things that seem to me lucid and
enlightened now they are seen from the inside I should honestly have
called dark and barbarous seen from the outside, when long ago in those
days of boyhood my fancy first caught fire with the glory of Francis of
Assisi. I too have lived in Arcady; but even in Arcady I met one walking
in a brown habit who loved the woods better than Pan. The figure in the
brown habit stands above the hearth in the room where I write, and alone
among many such images, at no stage of my pilgrimage has he ever seemed
to me a stranger. There is something of a harmony between the hearth and
the firelight and my own first pleasure in his words about the brother
fire; for he stands far enough back in my memory to mingle with all
those more domestic dreams of the first days. Even the fantastic shadows
thrown by fire make a sort of shadow pantomine that belongs to the
nursery; yet the shadows were even then the shadows of his favourite
beast and birds, as he saw them, grotesque but haloed with the love of
God. His Brother Wolf and Brother Sheep seemed then almost like the Brer
Fox and Brer Rabbit of a more Christian Uncle Remus. I have come slowly
to see many more marvellous aspects of such a man, but I have never lost
that one. His figure stands on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood
with my conversion to many other things; for the romance of his religion
has penetrated even the rationalism of that vague Victorian time. In so
far as I have had this experience, I may be able to lead others a little
further along that road; but only a very little further. Nobody knows
better than I do now that it is a road upon which angels might fear to
tread; but though I am certain of failure I am not altogether overcome
by fear; for he suffered fools gladly.
CHAPTER II THE WORLD ST. FRANCIS FOUND
The modern innovation which has substituted journalism for history, or
for that tradition that is the gossip of history, has had at least one
definite effect. It has insured that everybody should only hear the end
of every story. Journalists are in the habit of printing above the very
last chapters of their serial stories (when the hero and the heroine are
just about to embrace in the last chapter, as only an unfathomable
perversity prevented them from doing so in the first) the rather
misleading words, "You can only begin this story here." But even this is
not a complete parallel; for the journals do give some sort of a summary
of the story, while they never give anything remotely resembling a
summary of the history. Newspapers not only deal with news, but they
deal with everything as if it were entirely new. It is exactly in the
same fashion that we read that Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the
first intimation we have that he has ever been born.
There is something singularly significant in the use which journalism
makes of its stores of biography. It never thinks of publishing the life
until it is publishing the death. As it deals with individuals it deals
with institutions and ideas. After the Great War our public began to be
told of all sorts of nations being emancipated. It had never been told a
word about their being enslaved. We were called upon to judge of the
justice of settlements, when we had never been allowed to hear of the
very existence of the quarrels. People would think it pedantic to talk
about the Serbian epics and they prefer to talk about the Yugo-Slavonic
international new diplomacy; and they are quite excited about something
they call Czecho-Slovakia without apparently having ever heard about
Bohemia. Things that are as old as Europe are regarded as more recent
than the very latest claims pegged out on the prairies of America. It is
very exciting; like the last act of a play to people who have only come
into the theatre just before the curtain falls. But it does not conduce
exactly to knowing what it is all about. To those content with the mere
fact of a pistol-shot or a passionate embrace, such a leisurely manner
of patronising the drama may be recommended. To those tormented by a
mere intellectual curiosity about who is kissing or killing whom, it is
unsatisfactory.
Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same
imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half the story of
Christendom; and that the second half without the first half. Men for
whom reason begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete
account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose
origin they can never explain, or generally even imagine. Just as we
hear of the admiral being shot but have never heard of his being born,
so we all heard a great deal about the dissolution of the monasteries,
but we heard next to nothing about the creation of the monasteries. Now
this sort of history would be hopelessly insufficient, even for an
intelligent man who hated the monasteries. It is hopelessly insufficient
in connection with institutions that many intelligent men do in a quite
healthy spirit hate. For instance, it is possible that some of us have
occasionally seen some mention, by our learned leader-writers, of an
obscure institution called the Spanish Inquisition. Well, it really is
an obscure institution, according to them and the histories they read.
It is obscure because its origin is obscure. Protestant history simply
begins with the horrible thing in possession, as the pantomine begins
with the demon king in the goblin kitchen. It is likely enough that it
was, especially towards the end, a horrible thing that might be haunted
by demons; but if we say this was so, we have no notion why it was so.
To understand the Spanish Inquisition it would be necessary to discover
two things that we have never dreamed of bothering about; what Spain was
and what an Inquisition was. The former would bring in the whole great
question about the Crusade against the Moors; and by what heroic
chivalry a European nation freed itself of an alien domination from
Africa. The latter would bring in the whole business of the other
Crusade against the Albigensians, and why men loved and hated that
nihilistic vision from Asia. Unless we understand that there was in
these things originally the rush and romance of a Crusade, we cannot
understand how they came to deceive men or drag them on towards evil.
The Crusaders doubtless abused their victory, but there was a victory to
abuse. And where there is victory there is valour in the field and
popularity in the forum. There is some sort of enthusiasm that
encourages excesses or covers faults. For instance, I for one have
maintained from very early days the responsibility of the English for
their atrocious treatment of the Irish. But it would be quite unfair to
describe even the devilry of '98 and leave out altogether all mention of
the war with Napoleon. It would be unjust to suggest that the English
mind was bent on nothing but the death of Emmett, when it was more
probably full of the glory of the death of Nelson. Unfortunately '98 was
very far from being the last date of such dirty work; and only a few
years ago our politicians started trying to rule by random robbing and
killing, while gently remonstrating with the Irish for their memory of
old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago. But however badly we
may think of the Black-and tan business, it would be unjust to forget
that most of us were not thinking of Black-and-Tan but of khaki; and
that khaki had just then a noble and national connotation covering many
things. To write of the war with Ireland and leave out the war against
Prussia, and the English sincerity about it, would be unjust to the
English. So to talk about the torture-engine as if it had been a hideous
toy is unjust to the Spanish. It does not tell sensibly from the start
the story of what the Spaniards did, and why. We may concede to our
contempories that in any case it is not a story that ends well. We do
not insist that in their version it should begin well. What we complain
of is that in their version it does not begin at all. They are only in
at the death; or even, like Lord Tom Noddy, to late for the hanging. It
is quite true that it was more horrible than any hanging; but they only
gather, so to speak, the very ashes of the ashes; the fag-end of the
faggot.
The case of the Inquisition is here taken at random, for it is one among
any number illustrating the same thing; and not because it is especially
connected with St. Francis, in whatever sense it may have been connected
with St Dominic. It may well be suggested later indeed that St. Francis
is unintelligible, just as St. Dominic is unintelligible, unless we do
understand something of what the thirteenth century meant by heresy and
a crusade. But for the moment I use it as a lesser example for a much
larger purpose. It is to point out that to begin the story of St.
Francis with the birth of St Francis would be to miss the whole point of
the story, or rather not to tell the story at all. And it is to suggest
that the modern tail-foremost type of journalistic history perpetually
fails us. We learn about reformers without knowing what they had to
reform, about rebels without knowing what they rebelled against, of
memorials that are not connected with any memory and restorations of
things that apparently never existed before. Even at the expense of this
chapter appearing disproportionate, it is necessary to say something
about the great movements that led up to the entrance of the founder of
the Franciscans. It may seem to mean describing a world, or even a
universe to describe a man. It will inevitably mean that the world or
the universe will be described with a few desperate generalisations in a
few abrupt sentences. But so far from its meaning that we shall see a
very small figure under so large a sky, it will mean that we must
measure the sky before we can begin to measure the towering stature of
the man.
And this phrase alone brings me to the preliminary suggestions that seem
necessary before even a slight sketch of the life of St. Francis. It is
necessary to realise, in however rude and elementary a fashion, into
what sort of a world St. Francis entered and what had been the history
of that world, at least in so far as it affected him. It is necessary to
have, if only in a few sentences, a sort of preface in the form of an
Outline of History, if we may borrow the phrase of Mr. Wells. in the
case of Mr. Wells himself, it is evident that the distinguished novelist
suffered the same disadvantage as if he had been obliged to write a
novel of which he hated the hero. To write history and hate Rome, both
pagan and papal, is to hate everything that has happened. It comes very
nearly to hating humanity on purely humanitarian grounds. To dislike
both the priest and the soldier, both the laurels of the warrior and the
lilies of the saint, is to suffer a division from the mass of mankind
for which not all the dexterities of the finest and most flexible of
modern intelligences can compensate. A much wider sympathy is needed for
the historical setting of St. Francis, himself both a soldier and a
saint. I will therefore conclude this chapter with a few generalisations
about the world St. Francis found.
Men will not believe because they will not broaden their minds. As a
matter of individual belief, I should of course express it by saying
they are not sufficiently catholic to be Catholic. But I am not going to
discuss here the doctrinal truths of Christianity, but simply the broad
historical fact of Christianity, as it might appear to a really
enlightened and imaginative person even if he were not a Christian. What
I mean at the moment is that the majority of doubts are made out of
details. In the course of random reading a man comes across a pagan
custom that strikes him as picturesque or a Christian action that
strikes him as cruel; but he does not enlarge his mind sufficiently to
see the main truth about pagan custom or the Christian reaction against
it. Until we understand, not necessarily in detail, but in their big
bulk and proportion that pagan progress and that Christian reaction, we
cannot really understand the point of history at which St. Francis
appears or what his great popular mission was all about.
Now everybody knows, I imagine, that the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries were an awakening of the world. They were a fresh flowering of
culture and the creative arts after a long spell of much sterner and
even more sterile experience which we call the Dark Ages. They may be
called an emancipation; they were certainly an end; an end of what may
at least seem a harsher and more inhuman time. But what was it that was
ended? From what was it that men were emancipated? That is where there
is a real collision and point at issue between the different
philosophies of history. On the merely external and secular side, it has
been truly said that men awoke from a sleep; but there had been dreams
in that sleep of a mystical and sometimes of a monstrous kind. In that
rationalistic routine into which most modern historians have fallen, it
is considered enough to say that they were emancipated from mere savage
superstition and advanced towards mere civilised enlightenment. Now this
is the big blunder that stands as a stumbling-block at the very
beginning of our story. Anybody who supposes that the Dark Ages were
plain darkness and nothing else, and that the dawn of the thirteenth
century was plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able to make
head or tail of the human story of St. Francis of Assisi. The truth is
that the joy of St. Francis and his Jongleurs de Dieu was not merely an
awakening. It was something which cannot be understood without
understanding their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark Ages was not
merely the end of a sleep. It was certainly not merely the end of a
superstitious enslavement. It was the end of something belonging to a
quite definite but quite different order of ideas.
It was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It
marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally
worked out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from
the system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism, which was
the only thing that could have expelled them. Christianity had entered
the world to cure the world; and she cured it in the only way in which
it could be cured. Viewed merely in an external and experimental
fashion, the whole of the high civilisation of antiquity had ended in
the learning of a certain lesson; that is, in its conversion to
Christianity. But that lesson was a psychological fact as well as a
theological faith. That pagan civilization had indeed been a very high
civilisation. It would not weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen
it, to say that it was the highest that humanity ever reached. It had
discovered its still unrivalled arts of poetry and plastic
representation; it had discovered its own permanent political ideals; it
had discovered its own clear system of logic and language. But above
all, it had discovered its own mistake. That mistake was too deep to be
ideally defined; the short-hand of it is to call it the mistake of
nature-worship. It might almost as truly be called the mistake of being
natural; and it was a very natural mistake. The Greeks, the great guides
and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started out with the idea of something
splendidly obvious and direct; the idea that if a man walked straight
ahead on the high road of reason and nature, he would come to no harm;
especially if he was, as the Greek was, eminently enlightened and
intelligent. We might be so flippant as to say that man was simply to
follow his nose, so long as it was a Greek nose. And the case of the
Greeks themselves is alone enough to illustrate the strange but certain
fatality that attends upon this fallacy. No sooner did the Greeks
themselves begin to follow their own noses and their own notion of being
natural, than the queerest thing in history seems to have happened to
them. It was much too queer to be an easy matter to discuss. It may be
remarked that our more repulsive realists never give us the benefit of
their realism. Their studies of unsavoury subjects never take note of
the testimony they bear to the truths of traditional morality. But if we
had the taste for such things, we could cite thousands of such things as
part of the case for Christian morals. And an instance of this is found
in the fact that nobody has written, in this sense, a real moral history
of the Greeks. Nobody has seen the scale or the strangeness of the
story. The wisest men in the world set out to be natural; and the most
unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing they did. The
immediate effect of saluting the sun and the sunny sanity of nature was
a perversion spreading like a pestilence. The greatest and even the
purest philosophers could not apparently avoid this low sort of lunacy.
Why? It would seem simple enough for the people whose poets had
conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors had carved the Venus of Milo,
to remain healthy on the point. The truth is people who worship health
cannot remain healthy on the point. When Man goes straight he goes
crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out
of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in
accordance with something much deeper in human nature than
nature-worshippers could ever understand. It was the discovery of that
deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to
Christianity. There is a bias in a man like the bias on a bowl; and
Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore
hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is
profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was
the news of original sin.
Rome rose at the expense of her Greek teachers largely because she did
not entirely consent to be taught these tricks. She had a much more
decent tradition; but she ultimately suffered from the same fallacy in
her religious tradition; which was necessarily in no small degree the
heathen tradition of nature worship. What was the matter with the whole
heathen civilisation was that there nothing for the mass of men in the
way of mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery of the nameless
forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death. In the Roman Empire
also, long before the end, we find nature-worship inevitably producing
things that are against nature. Cases like that of Nero have passed into
a proverb when Sadism sat on a throne brazen in the broad daylight. But
the truth I mean is something much more subtle and universal than a
conventional catalogue of atrocities. What had happened to the human
imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by
dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions
becoming unnatural passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as only one
innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing
became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere
equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and
sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.
There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human
nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special
purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like
any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower,
is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly
bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago.
This is not to be confused with mere self-righteous sensationalism about
the wickedness of the pagan world. It was not so much that the pagan
world was wicked as that it was good enough to realise that its paganism
was becoming wicked, or rather it was on the logical high road to
wickedness. I mean that there was no future for "natural magic"; to
deepen it was only to darken it into black magic. There was no future
for it; because in the past it had only been innocent because it was
young. We might say it had only been innocent because it was shallow.
Pagans were wiser that paganism; that is why the pagans became
Christians. Thousands of them had philosophy and family virtues and
military honour to hold them up; but by this time the purely popular
thing called religion was certainly dragging them down. When this
reaction against the evil is allowed for, it is true to repeat that it
was an evil that was everywhere. In another and more literal sense its
name was Pan.
It was no metaphor to say that these people needed a new heaven and a
new earth; for they had really defiled their own earth and even their
own heaven. How could their case be met by looking at the sky, when
erotic legends were scrawled in stars across it; how could they learn
anything from the love of birds and flowers after the sort of love
stories that were told of them? It is impossible here to multiply
evidences, and one small example may stand for the rest. We know what
sort of sentimental associations are called up to us by the phrase "a
garden"; and how we think mostly of the memory of melancholy and
innocent romances, or quite as often of some gracious maiden lady or
kindly old person pottering under a yew hedge, perhaps in sight of a
village spire. Then, let anyone who knows a little Latin poetry recall
suddenly what would have once stood in place of the sun-dial or the
fountain, obscene and monstrous in the sun; and of what sort was the god
of their gardens.
Nothing could purge this obsession but a religion that was literally
unearthly. It was no good telling such people to have a natural religion
full of stars and flowers; there was not a flower or even a star that
had not been stained. They had to go into the desert where they could
find no flowers or even into the cavern where they could see no stars.
Into that desert and that cavern the highest human intellect entered for
some four centuries; and it was the very wisest thing it could do.
Nothing but the stark supernatural stood up for its salvation; if God
could not save it, certainly the gods could not. The early Church called
the gods of paganism devils; and the Early Church was perfectly right.
Whatever natural religion may have had to do with their beginnings,
nothing but fiends now inhabited those hollow shrines. Pan was nothing
but panic. Venus was nothing but venereal vice. I do not mean for a
moment, of course, that all the individual pagans were of this character
even to the end; but it was as individuals that they differed from it.
Nothing distinguishes paganism from Christianity so clearly as the fact
that the individual thing called philosophy had little or nothing to do
with the social thing called religion. Anyhow it was no good to preach
natural religion to people to whom nature had grown as unnatural as any
religion. They knew much better than we do what was the matter with them
and what sort of demons at once tempted and tormented them; and they
wrote across that great space of history the text; "This sort goeth not
out but by prayer and fasting."
Now the historical importance of St. Francis and the transition from the
twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, lies in the fact that they marked
the end of this expiation. Men at the close of the dark Ages may have
been rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with
heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean.
They were like children; the first beginnings of their rude arts have
all the clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive them in Europe
as a whole living under little local governments, feudal in so far as
they were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic
and carrying a far more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly
imperial as far as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy
something had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity;
the republic, Italy, was dotted with little states, largely democratic
in their ideals, and often filled with real citizens. But the city no
longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for
defence against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers. One
of these stood in a steep and striking position on the wooded hills of
Umbria; and its name was Assisi. Out of its deep gate under its high
turrets was to come the message that was the gospel of the hour, "Your
warfare is accomplished, your iniquity is pardoned." But it was out of
all these fragmentary things of feudalism and freedom and remains of
Roman Law that there were to rise, at the beginning of the thirteenth
century, vast and almost universal, the mighty civilisation of the
Middle Ages.
It is an exaggeration to attribute it entirely to the inspiration of any
one man, even the most original genius of the thirteenth century. Its
elementary ethics of fraternity and fair play had never been entirely
extinct and Christendom had never been anything less than Christian. The
great truisms about justice and pity can be found in the rudest monastic
records of the barbaric transition or the stiffest maxims of the
Byzantine decline. And early in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a
larger moral movement had clearly begun, but what may fairly be said of
it is this, that over all those first movements there was still
something of that ancient austerity that came from the long penitentiary
period. It was the twilight of the morning; but it was still a grey
twilight. This may be illustrated by the mere mention of two or three of
these reforms before the Franciscan reform. The monastic institution
itself, of course, was far older than all these things; indeed it was
undoubtedly almost as old as Christianity. Its counsels of perfection
had always taken the form of vows of chastity and poverty and obedience.
With these unworldly aims it had long ago civilised a great part of the
world. The monks had taught people to plough and sow as well as to read
and write; indeed they had taught the people nearly everything the
people knew. But it may truly be said that the monks were severely
practical, in the sense that they not only practical but also severe;
though they were generally severe with themselves and practical for
other people. All this early monastic movement had long ago settled down
and doubtless often deteriorated; but when we come to the first medieval
movements this sterner character is still apparent. Three examples may
be taken to illustrate the point.
First, the ancient social mould of slavery was already beginning to
melt. Not only was the slave turning into a serf, who was practically
free as regards his own farm and family life, but many lords were
freeing slaves and serfs altogether. This was done under the pressure of
the priests; but especially it was done in the spirit of a penance. In
one sense, of course, any Catholic society must have an atmosphere of
penance; but I am speaking of that sterner spirit of penance which had
expiated the excesses of paganism. There was about such restitutions the
atmosphere of the death-bed; as many of them were doubtless were
examples of death-bed repentance. A very honest atheist with whom I once
debated made use of the expression, "Men have only been kept in slavery
by the fear of hell." As I pointed out to him, if he had said that men
had only been freed from slavery by the fear of hell, he would have at
least have been referring to an unquestionable historical fact.
Another example was the sweeping reform of Church discipline by Pope
Gregory the Seventh. It really was a reform, undertaken from the highest
motives and having the healthiest results; it conducted a searching
inquisition against simony or the financial corruption of the clergy; it
insisted on a more serious and self-sacrificing ideal for the life of
the parish priest. But the very fact that this largely took the form of
making universal the obligation of celibacy will strike the note of
something which, however noble, would seem to many to be vaguely
negative. The third example is in one sense the strongest of all. For
the third example was a war; a heroic war and for many of us a holy war;
but still having all the stark and terrible responsibilities of war.
There is no space here to say all that should be said about the true
nature of the Crusades. Everybody knows that in the very darkest hour of
the Dark Ages a sort of heresy had sprung up in Arabia and become a new
religion of a military but nomadic sort; invoking the name of Mahomet.
Intrinsically it had a character found in many heresies from the Moslem
to the Monist. It seemed to the heretic a sane simplification of
religion; while it seems to a Catholic an insane simplification of
religion, because it simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the
breadth and balance of Catholicism. Anyhow its objective character was
that of a military danger to Christendom and Christendom had struck at
the very heart of it, in seeking to reconquer the Holy Places. The great
Duke Godfrey and the first Christians who stormed Jerusalem were heroes
if there were any in the world; but they were the heroes of a tragedy.
Now I have taken these two or three examples of the earlier medieval
movements in order to note about them one general character, which
refers back to the penance that followed paganism. There is something in
all these movements that is bracing even while it is still bleak, like a
wind blowing between the clefts of the mountains. That wind, austere and
pure, of which the poet speaks, is really the spirit of the time, for it
is the wind of a world that has at last been purified. To anyone who can
appreciate atmospheres there is something clear and clean about the
atmosphere of this crude and often harsh society. Its very lusts are
clean; for they no have longer any smell of perversion. Its very
cruelties are clean; they are not the luxurious cruelties of the
amphitheatre. They come either of a very simple horror at blasphemy or a
very simple fury at an insult. Gradually against this grey background
beauty begins to appear, as something really fresh and delicate and
above all surprising. Love returning is no longer what was once called
platonic but what is still called chivalric love. The flowers and stars
are have recovered their first innocence. Fire and water are felt to be
worthy to be the brother and sister of a saint. The purge of paganism is
complete at last.
For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as by
fire. Water is no longer the water into which slaves were flung to feed
the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children were
passed to Moloch. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten garlands
gathered in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more as signs of the
far frigidity of gods as cold as those cold fires. They are like all new
things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who shall come to
name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have now any longer the
old sinister significance of the world. They await a new reconciliation
with man, but they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has
stripped from his soul the last rag of nature worship, and can return to
nature.
While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a
little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness. For it was
the end of a long and stern night, a night of vigil, not unvisited by
stars. He stood with his hands lifted, as in so many statues and
pictures, and about him was a burst of birds singing; and behind him was
the break of day.
CHAPTER III FRANCIS THE FIGHTER
According to one tale, which if not true would be none the less typical,
the very name of St. Francis was not so much a name as a nickname. There
would be something akin to his familiar and popular instinct in the
notion that he was nicknamed very much as an ordinary schoolboy might be
called "Frenchy" at school. According to this version his name was not
Francis at all but John; and his companions called him "Francesco", or
"The little Frenchman" because of his passion for the French poetry of
the Troubadours. The more probable story is that his mother had him
named John when he was born in the absence of his father, who shortly
returned from a visit to France, Where his commercial success had filled
him with so much enthusiasm for French taste and social usage that he
gave his son the new name signifying the Frank or Frenchman. In either
case the name had a certain significance, as connecting Francis from the
first with what he himself regarded as the romantic fairy land of the
Troubadours.
The name of the father was Pietro Bernadone and he was a substantial
citizen of the guild of the cloth merchants in the town of Assisi. It is
hard to describe the position of such a man without some appreciation of
such a guild and even of such a town. It did not exactly correspond to
anything that is meant in modern times either by a merchant or a man of
business or a tradesman, or anything that exists under the conditions of
capitalism. Bernadone may have employed people but he was not an
employer; that is; he did not belong to an employing class as distinct
from an employed class. The person we definitely hear of his employing
is his son Francis; who, one is tempted to guess, was about the last
person that any man of business would employ if it were convenient to
employ anybody else. He was rich, as a peasant may be rich by the work
of his own family; but he evidently expected his own family to work in a
way almost as plain as a peasant's. He was a prominent citizen, but he
belonged to a social order which existed to prevent him being too
prominent to be a citizen. It kept all such people on their own simple
level, and no prosperity connoted that escape from drudgery by which in
modern times the lad might have seemed to be a lord or a fine gentleman
or something other than the cloth merchant's son. This is a rule that is
proved even in the exception. Francis was one of those people who are
popular with everybody in any case; and his guiless swagger as a
Troubadour and leader of French fashions made him a sort of romantic
ringleader among the young men of the town. He threw money about both in
extravagance and benevolence, in a way native to a man who never, all
his life, exactly understood what money was. This moved his mother to
mingled exultation and exasperation and she said, as any tradesman's
wife might say anywhere: "He is more like a prince than our son." But
one of the earliest glimpses we have of him shows him as simply selling
bales of cloth from a booth in the market; which his mother may or may
not have believed to be one of the habits of princes. This first glimpse
of the young man in the market is symbolic in more ways than one. An
incident occurred which is perhaps the shortest and sharpest summary
that could be given of certain curious things which were a part of his
character, long before it was transfigured by transcendental faith.
While he was selling velvet and fine embroideries to some solid merchant
of the town a beggar came imploring alms; evidently in a somewhat
tactless manner. It was a rude and simple society and there were no laws
to punish a starving man for expressing his need for food, such as have
been established in a more humanitarian age; and the lack of any
organised police permitted such persons to pester the wealthy without
any great danger. But there was I believe, in many places a local custom
of the guild forbidding outsiders to interrupt a fair bargain; and it is
possible that some such thing put the mendicant more than normally in
the wrong. Francis had all his life a great liking for people who had
been put hopelessly in the wrong. On this occasion he seems to have
dealt with the double interview with rather a divided mind; certainly
with distraction, possibly with irritation. Perhaps he was all the more
uneasy because of the almost fastidious standard of manners that came to
him quite naturally. All are agreed that politeness flowed from him from
the first, like one of the public fountains in such a sunny Italian
market place. He might have written among his own poems as his own motto
that verse of Mr. Belloc's poem--
"Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than courage of heart or holiness
Yet in my walks it seems to me
That the grace of God is in Courtesy."
Nobody ever doubted that Francis Bernadone had courage of heart, even of
the most manly and military sort; and a time was to come when there was
quite as little doubt about the holiness and grace of God. But I think
that if there was one thing about which he was punctilious, it was
punctiliousness. If there was one thing of which so humble a man could
be said to be proud, he was proud of good manners. Only behind his
perfectly natural urbanity were wider and even wilder possibilities, of
which we get the first flash in this trivial incident. Anyhow Francis
was evidently torn two ways with the botheration of two talkers, but
finished his business with the merchant somehow; and when he had
finished it, found the beggar was gone. Francis leapt from his booth,
left all the bales of velvet and embroidery behind him apparently
unprotected, and went racing across the market-place like an arrow from
the bow. Still running, he threaded the labrynth of the narrow and
crooked streets of the little town, looking for his beggar whom he
eventually discovered; and loaded the astonished mendicant with money.
Then he straightened himself, so to speak, and swore before God that he
would never all his life refuse help to a poor man. The sweeping
simplicity of this undertaking is extremely characteristic. Never was
any man so little afraid of his own promises. His life was one riot of
rash vows; of rash vows that turned out right.
The first biographers of Francis, naturally alive with the great
religious revolution that he wrought, equally naturally looked back to
his first years chiefly for omens and signs of such a spiritual
earthquake. But writing at a greater distance, we shall not decrease
that dramatic effect, but rather increase it, if we realise that there
was not at this time any external sign of anything particularly mystical
about the young man. He had not anything of that early sense of his
vocation that has belonged to some of the saints. Over and above his
main ambition to win fame as a French poet, he would seem to have most
often thought of winning fame as a soldier. He was born kind; he was
brave in the normal boyish fashion; but he drew the line in both in
kindness and bravery pretty well where most boys would have drawn it;
for instance, he had the human horror of leprosy of which few normal
people felt any need to be ashamed. He had the love of gay and bright
apparel which was inherent in the heraldic taste of medieval times and
seems altogether to have been rather a festive figure. If he did not
paint the town red, he would probably have preferred to paint it all the
colours of the rainbow, as in a medieval picture. But in this story of
the young man in gay garments scampering after the vanishing beggar in
rags there are certain notes of his natural individuality that must be
assumed from first to last.
For instance, there is the spirit of swiftness. In a sense he continued
running for the rest of his life, as he ran after the beggar. Because
nearly all the errands he ran were errands of mercy, there appeared in
his portraiture a mere element of mildness which was true in the truest
sense, but is easily misunderstood. A certain precipitancy was the very
poise of his soul. This saint should be represented among the other
saints as angels were sometimes represented in pictures of angels; with
flying feet or with feathers; in the spirit of the text that makes
angels winds and messengers a flaming fire. It is a curiosity of
language that courage actually means running; and some of our sceptics
will no doubt demonstrate that courage really means running away. But
his courage was running, in the sense of rushing. With all his
gentleness, there was originally something of impatience in his
impetuosity. The psychological truth about it illustrates very well the
modern muddle about the word "practical." If we mean by what is
practical what is most immediately practicable, we merely mean what is
easiest. In that sense St. Francis was very impractical, and his
ultimate aims were very unworldly. Bit if we mean by practicality a
preference for prompt effort and energy over doubt or delay, he was very
practical indeed. Some might call him a madman, but he was the very
reverse of a dreamer. Nobody would be likely to call him a man of
business; but he was very emphatically a man of action. In some of his
early experiments he was rather too much of a man of action; he acted
too soon and was too practical to be prudent. But at every turn of his
extraordinary career we shall find him flinging himself around corners
in the most unexpected fashion, as when he flew through the streets
after the beggar.
Another element implied in the story, which was already partially a
natural instinct, before it became supernatural ideal, was something
that had never perhaps been wholly lost in those little republics of
medieval Italy. It was something very puzzling to some people; something
clearer as a rule to Southerners than to Northeners, and I think to
Catholics than to Protestants; the quite natural assumption of the
equality of men. It has nothing necessarily to do with the Franciscan
love for men; on the contrary one of its merely practical tests is the
equality of the duel. Perhaps a gentleman will never be fully an
egalitarian until he can really quarrel with his servant. But it was an
antecedant condition of the Franciscan brotherhood; and we feel it in
this early and secular incident. Francis, I fancy, felt a real doubt
about which he must attend to, the beggar or the merchant; and having
attended to the merchant, he turned to attend the beggar; he thought of
them as two men. This is a thing much more difficult to describe, in a
society from which it is absent, but it was the original basis of the
whole business; it was why the popular movement arose in that sort of
place and that sort of man. His imaginative magnanimity rose like a
tower to starry heights that might well seem dizzy and even crazy; but
it was founded on this high table land of human equality.
I have taken this the first among a hundred tales of the youth of St.
Francis, and dwelt on its significance a little, because until we have
learned to look for the significance there will often seem to be little
but a sort of light sentiment in telling the story. St. Francis is not a
proper person to be patronised with merely "pretty" stories. There are
often any number of them; but they are too often used so as to be a sort
of sentimental sediment of the medieval world, instead of being, as the
saint emphatically is, a challenge to the modern world. We must take his
human development somewhat more seriously; and the next story in which
we get a glimpse of it is in a very different setting. But in exactly
the same way it opens, as if by accident, certain abysses of the mind
and perhaps of the unconscious mind. Francis still looks more or less
like an ordinary young man; and it is only when we look at him as an
ordinary young man, that we realise what an extraordinary young man he
was.
War had broken out between Assisi and Perugia. It is now fashionable to
say in a satirical spirit that such wars did not so much break out as to
go on idefinitely between the city states of medieval Italy. It will be
enough to say here that if one of those medieval wars had really gone on
without stopping for a century, it might possibly have come within a
remote distance of killing as many people as we kill in a year, in one
of our great modern scientific wars between our great modern industrial
empires. But the citizens of the medieval republic were certainly under
the limitation of only being asked to die for the things with which they
had always lived, the house they inhabited, the shrines they venerated
and the rulers and representatives they new; and had not the larger
vision calling for them to die for the latest rumours about remote
colonies as reported in anonymous newspapers. And if we infer from our
own experience that war paralyzed civilization, we must at least admit
that these warring towns turned out a number of paralytics who go by the
names of Dante and Michael Angelo, Ariosto and Titian, Leonardo and
Columbus, not to mention Catherine of Siena and the subject of this
story. While we lament all this local patriotism as a hubbub of the Dark
Ages, it must seem a rather curious fact that about three quarters of
the greatest men who ever lived came out of these little towns and were
often engaged in these little wars. It remains to be seen what will
ultimately come out of our large towns; but there has been no sign of
anything of this sort since they became large; and I have sometimes been
haunted by a fancy of my youth, that these things will not come till
there is a city wall around Clapham and the tocsin is rung at night to
arm the citizens of Wimbledon.
Anyhow, the tocsin was rung at Assisi and the citizens armed, and among
them was Francis the son of the cloth merchant. He went out to fight
with some company of lancers and in some fight or other he and his
little band were taken prisoners. To me it seems most probable that
there had been some tale of treason or cowardice about the disaster; for
we are told that there was one of the captives with whom his
fellow-prisoners flatly refused to associate even in prison; and when
this happens in such circumstances, it is generally because the military
blame for the surrender is thrown on some individual. Anyhow, somebody
noted a small but rather curious thing, though it might seem rather
negative than positive. Francis, we are told, moved among his captive
companions with all his characteristic courtesy and even conviviality,
"liberal and hilarious" as somebody said of him, resolved to keep up
their spirits and his own. And when he came across the mysterious
outcast, traitor or coward or whatever he was called, he simply treated
him exactly like all the rest, neither with coldness or compassion, but
with the same unaffected gaiety and good fellowship. But if there had
been present in that prison someone with a sort of second sight about
the truth and trend of spiritual things, he might have known he was in
the presence of something new and seemingly almost anarchic; a deep tide
driving out to uncharted seas of charity. For in this sense there was
really something wanting in Francis of Assisi, something to which he was
blind that he might see better and more beautiful things. All those
limits in good fellowship and good form, all those landmarks of social
life that divide the tolerable and the intolerable, all those social
scruples and conventional conditions that are normal and even noble in
ordinary men, all those things that hold many decent societies together,
could never hold this man at all. He liked as he liked; he seems to have
liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for
liking. Something very vast and universal was already present in that
narrow dungeon; and such a seer might have seen in its darkness that red
halo of caritas caritatum which marks one saint among saints as well as
among men. He might well have heard the first whisper of that wild
blessing that afterwards took the form of a blasphemy; "He listens to
those whom God himself will not listen".
But though such a seer might have seen such a truth, it is exceedingly
doubtful if Francis himself saw it. He had acted out of an unconscious
largeness, or in the fine medieval phrase largesse, within himself,
something might almost have been lawless if it had not been reaching out
to a more divine law; but is doubtful whether he new the law was divine.
It is evident that he had not at this time any notion of abandoning the
military, still less of adopting the monastic life. It is true that
there is not, as pacifists and prigs imagine, the least inconsistency
between loving men and fighting them, if we fight them fairly and for a
good cause. But it seems to me that there was more than this involved;
that the mind of the young man was really running towards a military
morality in any case. About this time the first calamity crossed his
path in the form of a malady which was to revisit him many times and
hamper his headlong career. Sickness made him more serious; but one
fancies it would only have made him a more serious soldier, or even more
serious about soldiering. And while he was recovering, something rather
larger than the little fueds and raids of the Italian towns opened an
avenue of adventure and ambition. The crown of Sicily, a considerable
centre of controversy at the time, was apparently claimed by a certain
Gauthier de Brienne, and the Papal cause to aid which Gauthier was
called in aroused enthusiasm among a number of young Assisians,
including Francis, who proposed to march into Apulia on the count's
behalf; perhaps his French name had something to do with it. For it must
never be forgotten that though that world was in one sense a world of
little things, it was a world of little things concerned with great
things. There was more internationalism in the lands dotted with tiny
republics than in the huge homogeneous impenetrable national divisions
of to-day. The legal authority of the Assisian magistrates might hardly
reach further than a bow-shot from their high embattled city walls. But
their sympathies might be with the ride of the Normans through Sicily or
the palace of the Troubadours at Toulouse; with the Emperor throned in
the German forests or the great Pope dying in the exile of Salerno.
Above all, it must be remembered that when the interests of an age are
mainly religious they must be universal. Nothing can be more universal
than the universe. And there are several things about the religious
position at that particular moment which modern people not unnaturally
fail to realise. For one thing, modern people naturally think of people
so remote as ancient people, and even early people. We feel vaguely that
these things happened in the first ages of the Church. The Church was
already a good deal more than a thousand years old. That is, the Church
was then rather older than France is now, a great deal older than
England is now. And she looked old then; almost as old as she does now;
possibly older than she does now. The Church looked like great
Charlemagne with the long white beard, who had already fought a hundred
wars with the heathen, and in the legend was bidden by an angel to go
forth and fight once more though he was two thousand years old. The
Church had topped her thousand years and turned the corner for the
second thousand; she had come through the Dark Ages in which nothing
could be done except desperate fighting against the barbarians and the
stubborn repitition of the creed. The creed was still being repeated
after the victory or escape; but it is not unnatural to suppose that
there was something a little monotonous about the repitition. The Church
looked old then as now; and there were some who thought her dying as
now. In truth orthodoxy was not dead but it may have been dull; it is
certain that some people began to think it dull. The Troubadours of the
Provencal movement had already begun to take that turn or twist towards
Oriental fancies and the paradox of pessimism, which always comes to
Europeans as something fresh when their own sanity seems to be something
stale. It is likely enough that after all those centuries of hopeless
war without and ruthless asceticism within, the official orthodoxy
seemed to be something stale. The freshness and freedom of the first
Christians seemed then as much as now a lost and almost prehistoric age
of gold. Rome was still more rational than anything else; the Church was
really wiser but it may well have seemed wearier than the world. There
was something more adventurous and alluring, perhaps, about the mad
metaphysics that had been blown across out of Asia. Dreams were
gathering like dark clouds over the Midi to break in a thunder of
anathema and civil war. Only the light lay on the great plain around
Rome; but the light was blank and the plain was flat; and there was no
stir in the still air and the immemorial silence about the sacred town.
High in the dark house of Assisi Francesco Bernadonne slept and dreamed
of arms. There came to him in the darkness a vision splendid with
swords, patterned after the cross in the Crusading fashion, of spears
and shields and helmets hung in a high armoury, all bearing the sacred
sign. When he awoke he accepted the dream as a trumpet bidding him to
the battlefield, and rushed out to take horse and arms. He delighted in
all the exercises of chivalry; and was evidently an accomplished
cavalier and fighting man by the tests of the camp. He would doubtless
at any time have preferred a Christian sort of chivalry; but it seems
clear that he was also in a mood which thirsted for glory, though in him
that glory would always have been identical with honour. He was not
without some vision of that wreath of laurel which Ceasar has left for
all the Latins. As he rode out to war the great gate in the deep wall of
Assisi resounded with his last boast, "I shall come back a great
prince."
A little way along the road his sickness rose again and threw him. It
seems highly probable, in the light of his impetuous temper, that he had
ridden away long before he was fit to move. And in the darkness of this
second and fare more desolating interruption, he seems to have had
another dream in which a voice said to him, "You have mistaken the
meaning of the vision. Return to your own town." And Francis trailed
back in his sickness to Assisi, a very dismal and disappointed and
perhaps even derided figure, with nothing to do but wait for what should
happen next. It was his first descent into a dark ravine that is called
the valley of humiliation, which seemed to him very rocky and desolate,
but in which he was afterwards to find many flowers.
But he was not only disappointed and humiliated; he was very much
puzzled and bewildered. He still firmly believed that his two dreams
must have meant something; and he could not imagine what they could
possibly mean. It was while he was drifting, one might even say mooning,
about the streets of Assisi and the fields outside the city wall, that
an incident occurred to him which has not always been immediately
connected with the business of the dreams, but which seems to me the
obvious culmination of them. He was riding listlessly in some wayside
place, apparently in the open country, when he saw a figure coming along
the road towards him and halted; for he saw it was a leper. And he knew
instantly that his courage was challenged, not as the world challenges,
but as one would challenge who knew the secrets of the heart of a man.
What he saw advancing was not the banner and spears of Perugia, from
which it never occurred to him to shrink; nor the armies that fought for
the crown of Sicily, of which he had always thought as a courageous man
thinks of mere vulgar danger. Francis Bernadone saw his fear coming up
the road towards him; the fear that comes from within and not without;
though it stood white and horrible in the sunlight. For once in the long
rush of his life his soul must have stood still. Then he sprang from his
horse, knowing nothing between stillness and swiftness, and rushed on
the leper and threw his arms around him. It was the beginning of a long
vocation of ministry among many lepers, for whom he did many services;
to this man he gave what money he could and mounted and rode on. We do
not know how far he rode, or with what sense of the things around him;
but it is said that when he looked back, he could see no figure on the
road.
CHAPTER IV FRANCIS THE BUILDER
We have now reached the great break in the life of Francis of Assisi;
the point at which something happened to him that must remain greatly
dark to most of us, who are ordinary and selfish men whom God has not
broken to make anew.
In dealing with this difficult passage, especially for my own purpose of
making things moderately easy for the more secular sympathiser, I have
hesitated as to the more proper course; and have eventually decided to
state first of all what happened, with little more of a hint of what I
imagine to have been the meaning of what happened. The fuller meaning
may be debated more easily afterwards, when it was unfolded in the full
Franciscan life. Anyway, what happened was this. The story very largely
revolves around the ruins of the Church of St. Damien, an old shrine in
Assisi which was apparently neglected and falling to pieces. Here
Francis was in the habit of praying before the crucifix during those
dark and aimless days of transition which followed the tragical collapse
of all his military ambitions, probably made bitter by some loss of
social prestige terrible to his sensitive spirit. As he did so he heard
a voice saying to him, "Francis, seest thou not that my house is in
ruins? Go and restore it for me."
Francis sprang up and went. To go and do something was one of the
driving demands of his nature; probably he had gone and done it before
he had at all thoroughly thought out what he had done. In any case what
he had done was something very decisive and immediately very disastrous
for his singular social career. In the coarse conventional language of
the uncomprehending world, he stole. From his own enthusiastic point of
view, he extended to his venerable father Peter Bernadone the exquisite
excitement and inestimable privilege of assisting, more or less
unconsciously, in the rebuilding of St. Damiens Church. In point of fact
what he did first was to sell his own horse and then go off and sell
several bales of his father's cloth, making the sign of the cross over
them to indicate their pious and charitable destination. Peter Bernadone
did not see things in this light. Peter Bernadone indeed had not very
much light to see by, so far as understanding the genius and temperament
of his extraordinary son was concerned. Instead of understanding in what
sort of a wind and flame of abstract appetites the lad was living,
instead of simply telling him (as the priest practically did later) that
he done an indefensible thing with the best intentions, old Bernadone
took up the matter in the hardest style; in a legal and literal fashion.
He used absolute political powers like a heathen father, and himself put
his son under lock and key as a vulgar thief. It would appear that the
cry was caught up among many with whom the unlucky Francis had once been
popular; and altogether, in his efforts to build up the house of God he
had only succeeded in bringing his own house about his ears and lying
buried under the ruins. The quarrel dragged drearily through several
stages; at one time the wretched young man seems to have disappeared
underground, so to speak, into some cavern or cellar where he remained
huddled hopelessly in the darkness. Anyhow, it was his blackest moment;
the whole world had turned over; the whole world was on top of him.
When he came out, it was only perhaps gradually that anybody grasped
that something had happened. He and his father were summoned in the
court of the bishop; for Francis had refused the authority of all legal
tribunals. The bishop addressed some remarks to him, full of that
excellent common sense which the Catholic Church keeps permanently as
the background for all the fiery attitudes of her saints. He told
Francis that he must unquestionably restore the money to his father;
that no blessing could follow a work done by unjust methods; and in
short (to put it crudely) if the young fanatic would give back his money
to the old fool, the incident would then terminate. There was a new air
about Francis. He was no longer crushed, still less crawling, so far as
his father was concerned; yet his words do not, I think, indicate either
just indignation or wanton insult or anything in the nature of a mere
continuation of the quarrel. They are rather remotely akin to the
mysterious utterances of his great model, "What have I to do with thee?"
or even the terrible "Touch me not."
He stood up before them all and said, "Up to this time I have called
Pietro Bernadone father, but now I am the servant of God. Not only the
money but everything that can be called his I will restore to my father,
even the very clothes he has given me." And he rent off all his garments
except one; and they saw that it was a hair-shirt.
He piled the garments in a heap on the floor and threw the money on top
of them. Then he turned to the bishop, and received his blessing, like
one who turns his back on society; and, according to the account, went
out as he was into the cold world. Apparently it was literally a cold
world at the moment, and snow was on the ground. A curious detail, very
deep in its significance, I fancy, is given in the same account of this
great crisis in his life. He went out half-naked in his hair shirt into
the winter woods, walking the frozen ground between the frosty trees: a
man without a father. He was penniless, he was parentless, he was to all
appearances without a trade or a plan or a hope in the world; and as he
went under the frosty trees, he burst suddenly into song.
It was apparently noted as remarkable that the language in which he sang
was French, or that Provencal which was called for convenience French.
It was not his native language; and it was in his native language that
he ultimately won fame as a poet; indeed St. Francis is one of the very
first of the national poets in the purely national dialects of Europe.
But it was the language with which all his most boyish ardours and
ambitions had been identified; it was for him pre-eminently the language
of romance. That it broke from him in this extraordinary extremity seems
to me something at first sight very strange and in the last analysis
very significant. What that significance was, or may well have been, I
will try to suggest in the subsequent chapter; it is enough to indicate
here that the whole philosophy of St. Francis revolved around the idea
of a new supernatural light on natural things, which meant the ultimate
recovery not the ultimate refusal of natural things. And for the purpose
of this purely narrative part of the business, it is enough to record
that while he wandered in the winter forest in his hair-shirt, like the
very wildest of the hermits, he sang in the tongue of the Troubadours.
Meanwhile the narrative naturally reverts to the problem of the ruined
or at least neglected church, which had been the starting point of the
saint's innocent crime and beatific punishment. That problem still
predominated in his mind and was soon engaging his insatiable
activities; but they were activities of a new sort; and he made no more
attempts to interfere with commercial ethics of the town of Assisi.
There had dawned on him one of those great paradoxes that are also
platitudes. He realised that the way to build a church is not to become
entangled in bargains and, to him, rather bewildering questions of legal
claim. The way to build a church is not to pay for it, certainly not
with somebody else's money. The way to build a church is not to pay for
it even with your own money. The way to build a church is to build it.
He went about by himself collecting stones. He begged all the people he
met to give him stones. In fact he became a new sort of beggar,
reversing the parable; a beggar who asks not for bread but stone.
Probably, as happened to him again and again throughout his
extraordinary existence, the very queerness of the request gave it a
sort of popularity; and all sorts of idle and luxurious people fell in
with the benevolent project, as they would have done with a bet. He
worked with his own hands at the rebuilding of the church, dragging the
material like a beast of burden and learning the very last and lowest
lessons of toil. A vast number of stories are told about Francis at this
as at every other period of his life; but for the purpose here, which is
one of simplification, it is best to dwell on this definite re-entrance
of the saint into the world by the low gate of physical labour. There
does indeed run through the whole of his life a sort of double meaning,
like his shadow thrown upon the wall. All his actions had something of
the character of an allegory; and it is likely enough that some
leaden-witted scientific historian may some day try to prove that he
himself was never anything but an allegory. It is true enough in this
sense that he was labouring at a double task, and rebuilding something
else as well as the church of St. Damien. He was not only discovering
the general lesson that his glory was not to be in overthrowing men in
battle but in building up the positive and creative monuments of peace.
He was truly building up something else, or beginning to build it up;
something that has often enough fallen into ruin but has never been past
rebuilding; a church that could always be built anew though it had
rotted away to its first foundation stone, against which the gates of
hell shall not prevail.
The next stage in his progress is probably marked by his transferring
the same energies of architectural reconstruction to the little church
of St. Mary of the Angels at the Portiuncula. He had already done
something of the same kind at a church dedicated to St. Peter; and that
quality in his life noted above, which made it seem like a symbolical
drama, led many of his most devout biographers to note the numerical
symbolism of the three churches. There was at any rate a more historical
and practical symbolism about two of them. For the original church of
St. Damian afterwards became the seat of his striking experiment of a
female order, and of the pure and spiritual romance of St. Clare. And
the church of the Portiuncula will remain forever as one of the great
historic buildings of the world; for it was here that he gathered the
little knot of friends and enthusiasts; it was the home of many homeless
men. At this time, however, it is not clear that he had the definite
idea of any such monastic developments. How early the plan appeared in
his own mind it is of course impossible to say; but on the face of
events it first takes the form of a few friends who attached themselves
to him one by one because they shared his own passion for simplicity.
The account given of the form of their dedication is, however,
significant; for it was that of an invocation of the simplification of
life as suggested in the New Testament. The adoration of Christ had been
a part of the man's passionate nature for a long time past. But the
imitation of Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, may in
that sense may be said to begin here.
The two men who have the credit, apparently, of having first perceived
something of what was happening in the world of the soul were a solid
and wealthy citizen named Bernard of Quintaville and a canon from a
neighbouring church named Peter. It is the more to their credit because
Francis, if one may put it so, was by this time wallowing in poverty and
association with lepers and ragged mendicants; and the two were men with
much to give up; the one of comforts in the world and the other of
ambition in the church. Bernard the rich burgher did quite literally and
finally sell all he had and give it to the poor. Peter did even more;
for he descended from a chair of spiritual authority, probably when he
was already a man of mature years and therefore of fixed mental habits,
to follow an extravagant young eccentric whom most people probably
regarded as a maniac. What it was which they had caught a glimpse, of
which Francis had seen the glory, may be suggested later so far as it
can be suggested at all. At this stage we need profess to see no more
than all Assisi saw, and that something not altogether unworthy of
comment. The citizens of Assisi only saw the camel go in triumph through
the eye of the needle and God do impossible things because to him all
things were possible; only a priest who rent his robes like the Publican
and not like the Pharisee and a rich man who went away joyful, for he
had no possessions.
These three strange figures are said to have built themselves a sort of
hut or den adjoining the leper hospital. There they talked to each
other, in the intervals of drudgery and danger (for it needed ten times
more courage to look after a leper than to fight for the crown of
Sicily), in the terms of their new life, almost like children talking a
secret language. Of these individual elements on their first friendship
we can say little with certainty; but it is certain that they remained
friends to the end. Bernard of Quintaville occupies in the story
something of the position of Sir Bedivere, "first made and latest left
of Arthur's knights," for he reappears at the right hand side of the
saint on his deathbed and receives some sort of special blessing. But
all these things belong to another historical world and were quite
remote from the ragged and fantastic trio in their tumble-down hut. They
were not monks except perhaps in the most literal and archaic sense
which was identical with hermits. They were, so to speak, three
solitaries living together socially, but not as a society. The whole
thing seems to have been intensely individual, as seen from the outside
doubtless individual to the point of insanity. The stir of something
that had in it the promise of a movement or a mission can first be felt
as I have said in the affair of the appeal to the New Testament.
It was a sort of sors vigiliana applied to the Bible; a practice not
unknown among Protestants though open to their criticism, one would
think, as being rather a superstition of pagans. Anyhow it seems almost
the opposite of searching the Scriptures to open them at random; but St.
Francis certainly opened them at random. According to one story, he
merely made the sign of the cross over the volume of the Gospel and
opened it at three places reading three texts. The first was the tale of
the rich young man whose refusal to sell all his goods was the occasion
of the great paradox about the camel and the needle. The second was the
commandment to the disciples to take nothing with them on their journey,
neither scrip nor staff nor any money. The third was that saying,
literally to be called crucial, that the follower of Christ must also
carry his cross. There is a somewhat similar story of St. Francis
finding one of these texts, almost as accidentally, merely in listening
to what happened to be the Gospel of the day. But from the former
version at least it would seem that the incident occurred very early
indeed in his new life; for it was after this oracle, apparently, that
Bernard the first disciple rushed forth and scattered all his goods
among the poor. If this be so, it would seem that nothing followed it
for the moment except the individual ascetical life with the hut for a
hermitage. It must of course have been a rather public sort of
hermitage, but it was none the less in a very real sense withdrawn from
the world. St. Simeon Stylites on the top of his pillar was in one sense
an exceedingly public character; but there was something a little
singular in his situation for all that. It must be presumed that most
people thought the situation of Francis singular, that some even thought
it too singular. There was inevitably indeed in any Catholic society
something ultimate and even subconscious that was at least capable of
comprehending it better than a pagan or puritan society could comprehend
it. But we must not at this stage, I think, exaggerate this potential
public sympathy. As has already been suggested, the Church and all its
institutions had already the air of being old and settled and sensible
things, the monastic institutions amongst the rest. Common sense was
commoner in the Middle Ages, I think, than in our own rather jumpy
journalistic age; but men like Francis are not common in any age, nor
are they to be fully understood merely by the exercise of common sense.
The thirteenth century was certainly a progressive period; perhaps the
only really progressive period in human history. But it can truly be
called progressive precisely because its progress was very orderly. It
is really and truly an example of an epoch of reforms without
revolutions. But the reforms were not only progressive but very
practical; and they were very much to the advantage of highly practical
institutions; the towns and the trading guilds and the manual crafts.
Now the solid men of town and guild in the time of Francis of Assisi
were probably very solid indeed. They were much more economically equal,
they were much more justly governed in their own economic environment,
than the moderns who struggle madly between starvation and the
monopolist prizes of capitalism; but it likely enough that the majority
of citizens were as hard-headed as peasants. Certainly the behaviour of
the venerable Pietro Bernadone does not indicate a delicate sympathy
with the fine and almost fanciful subtleties of the Franciscan spirit.
And we cannot measure the beauty and originality of this strange
spiritual adventure, unless we have the humour and human sympathy to put
into plain words how it would have looked to such an unsympathetic
person at the time when it happened. In the next chapter I shall make an
attempt, inevitably inadequate, to indicate the inside of the story of
the building of the three churches and the little hut. In this chapter I
have but outlined it from the outside. And in concluding that chapter I
ask the reader to remember and realize what the story really looked
like, when thus seen from the outside. Given a critic of rather coarse
common sense, with no feeling about the incident except annoyance, and
how would the story seem to stand?
A young fool or rascal is caught robbing his father and selling goods
which he ought to guard; and the only explanation he will offer is that
a loud voice from nowhere spoke in his ear and told him to mend the
cracks and holes in a particular wall. He then declared himself
naturally independant of all powers corresponding to the police or
magistrates, and takes refuge with an amiable bishop who is forced to
remonstrate with him and tell him he is wrong. He then proceeds to take
off his clothes in public and practically throw them at his father;
announcing at the same time that his father is not his father at all. He
then runs about the town asking everybody he meets to give him fragments
of buildings or building materials, apparently with reference to his old
monomania about mending the wall. It may be an excellent thing that
cracks should be filled up, but preferably not by somebody who is
himself cracked; and architectural restoration like other things is not
best performed by builders who, as we should say, have a tile loose.
Finally the wretched youth relapses into rags and squalor and
practically crawls away into the gutter. That is the spectacle that
Francis must have presented to a very large number of his neighbours and
friends.
How he lived at all must have seemed to them dubious; but presumably he
already begged for bread as he had begged for building materials. But he
was always very careful to beg for the blackest or worst bread he could
get, for the stalest crusts or something less luxurious than the crumbs
which the dogs eat, and which fell from the rich man's table. Thus he
probably fared worse than an ordinary beggar; for the beggar would eat
the best he could get and the saint ate the worst he could get. In plain
fact he was ready to live on refuse; and it was probably something much
uglier as an experience than the refined simplicity which vegetarians
and water drinkers would call the simple life. As he dealt with the
question of food, so he apparently dealt with the question of clothing.
He dealt with it, that is, upon the same principle of taking what he
could get, and not even the best of what he could get. According to one
story he changed clothes with a beggar; and he would doubtless have been
content to change them with a scarecrow. In another version he got hold
of the rough brown tunic of a peasant, but presumably only because the
peasant gave him his very oldest brown tunic, which was probably very
old indeed. Most peasants have few changes of clothing to give away; and
some peasants are not specially inclined to give them away unless
absolutely necessary. It is said that in place of the girdle which he
had flung off (perhaps with the more symbolic scorn because it probably
carried the purse or wallet by the fashion of the period) he picked up a
rope more or less at random, because it was lying near, and tied it
round his waist. He undoubtedly meant it as a shabby expedient; rather
as the very destitute tramp will sometimes tie his clothes together with
a piece of string. He meant to strike the note of collecting his clothes
anyway, like rags from a succession of dust bins. Ten years later that
make-shift costume was the uniform of five thousand men; and a hundred
years later, in that, for a pontifical panoply, they laid great Dante in
the grave.
CHAPTER V LE JONGLEUR DE DIEU
Many signs and symbols might yet be used to give a hint of what really
happened in the mind of the young poet of Assisi. Indeed they are at
once too numerous for selection and yet too slight for satisfaction. But
one of them may be adumbrated in this small and apparently accidental
fact; that when he and his secular companions carried their pageant of
poetry through the town, they called themselves Troubadours. But when he
and his spiritual companions came out to do their spiritual work in the
world, they were called by their leader the Jongleurs de Dieu.
Nothing has been said here at any length of the great culture of the
Troubadours as it appeared in Provence or Languedoc, great as was their
influence in history and their influence on St. Francis. Something more
May be said of them when we come to summarise his relation to history;
it is enough to note here in a few sentences the facts about them that
were relevant to him, and especially the particular point now in
question, which was the most relevant of all. Everybody knows who the
Troubadours were; everybody knows that very early in the Middle Ages, in
the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there arose a civilisation
in Southern France which threatened to rival or eclipse the rising
tradition of Paris. Its chief product was a school of poetry, or rather
more especially a school of poets. They were primarily love-poets,
though they were often also satirists and critics of things in general.
Their picturesque posture in history is largely due to the fact that
they sang their own poems and often played their own accompaniments, on
the light musical instruments of the period; they were minstrels as well
as men of letters. Allied to their love-poetry were other institutions
of a decorative and fanciful kind concerned with the same theme. There
was what was called the "Gay Science," the attempt to reduce to a sort
of system the fine shades of flirtation and philandering. There were the
things called Courts of Love, in which the same delicate subjects were
dealt with legal pomp and pedantry. There is one point in this part of
the business that must be remembered in relation to St. Francis. There
were manifest moral dangers in all this superb sentimentalism; but it is
a mistake to suppose that its only danger of exaggeration was in the
direction of sensualism. There was a strain in the southern romance that
was actually an excess of spirituality; just as the pessimist heresy it
produced was in one sense an excess of spirituality. The love was not
always animal; sometimes it was so airy as to be almost allegorical. The
reader realises that the lady is the most beautiful being that can
possibly exist, only he has occasional doubts as to whether she does
exist. Dante owed something to the Troubadours; and the critical debates
about his ideal woman are an excellent example of these doubts. We know
that Beatrice was not his wife, but we should in any case be equally
sure she was not his mistress; and some critics have even suggested that
she was nothing at all, so to speak, except his muse. This idea of
Beatrice as an allegorical figure is, I believe, unsound; it would seem
unsound to any man who has read the Vit Nuova and has been in love. But
the very fact that it is possible to suggest it illustrates something
abstract and scholastic in these medieval passions. But though they were
abstract passions they were very passionate passions. These men could
feel almost like lovers, even about allegories and abstractions. It is
necessary to realise that St. Francis was talking the true language of a
troubadour when he said that he also had a most glorious and gracious
lady and that her name was poverty.
But the particular point to be noted here is not concerned so much with
the word Troubadour as with the word Jongleur. It is especially
concerned with the transition from one to the other; and for this it is
necessary to grasp another detail about the poets of the Gay Science. A
jongleur was not the same thing as a troubadour, even if the same man
were both a troubadour and a jongleur. More often, I believe, they were
separate men as well as separate trades. In many cases, apparently the
two men would walk the world together like companions in arms, or rather
companions in arts. The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester;
sometimes he was what we should call a juggler. This is the point, I
imagine, of the tale about Taillifer the Jongleur at the Battle of
Hastings, who sang the death of Roland while he tossed up his sword and
caught it, as a juggler catches balls. Sometimes he may been even a
tumbler; like that acrobat in the beautiful legend who was called "The
Tumbler of Our Lady," because he turned head over heels and stood on his
head before the image of the Blessed Virgin, for which he was nobly
thanked and comforted by her and the whole company of heaven. In the
ordinary way, we may imagine, the troubadour would exalt the company
with earnest and solemn strains of love and then the jongleur would do
his turn as a sort as a sort of comic relief. A glorious medieval
romance remains to be written about two such companions wandering
through the world. At any rate, if there is one place in which the
Franciscan spirit can be found outside the true Franciscan story, it is
in the tale of the Tumbler of our Lady. And when St. Francis called his
followers the Jongleurs de Dieu, he meant something very like the
Tumblers of our Lady.
Somewhere in that transition from the ambition of the Troubadour to the
antics of the Tumbler is hidden, as under a parable, the truth of St.
Francis. Of the two minstrels or entertainers, the jester was presumably
the servant or at least the secondary figure. St. Francis really meant
what he said when he said he had found the secret of life in being the
servant and the secondary figure. There was to be found ultimately in
such service a freedom almost amounting to frivolity. It was comparable
to the condition of the jongleur because it almost amounted to
frivolity. The jester could be free when the knight was rigid; and it
was possible to be a jester in the service which is perfect freedom.
This parallel of the two poets or minstrels is perhaps the best
preliminary and external statement of the Franciscan change of heart,
being conceived under an image with which the imagination of the modern
world has a certain sympathy. There was, of course, a great deal more
than this involved; and we must endeavour however insufficiently to
penetrate past the image to the idea. It is so far like the tumblers
that it is really to many people a topsy-turvy idea.
Francis, at the time or somewhere about the time when he disappeared
into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain
psychological kind; which was really like the reversal of a complete
somersault, in that by coming full circle it came back, or apparently
came back, to the same normal posture. It is necessary to use the
grotesque simile of an acrobatic antic, because there is hardly any
other figure that will make the fact clear. But in the inward sense it
was a profound spiritual revolution. The man who went into the cave was
not the man who came out again; in that sense he was almost as different
as if he were dead, as if he were a ghost or a blessed spirit. And the
effects of this on his attitude towards the actual world were really as
extravagant as any parallel can make them. He looked at the world as
differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole
walking on his hands.
If we apply this parable of Our Lady's Tumbler to the case, we shall
come very near to the point of it. Now it really is a fact that any
scene such as a landscape can sometimes be more clearly and freshly seen
if it is seen upside down. There have been landscape-painters who
adopted the most startling and pantomimic postures in order to look at
it for a moment in that fashion. Thus that inverted vision, so much more
bright and quaint and arresting, does bear a certain resemblance to the
world which a mystic like St. Francis sees every day. But herein is the
essential part of the parable. Our Lady's Tumbler did not stand on his
head in order to see flowers and trees as a clearer or quainter vision.
He did not do so; and it would never have occurred to him to do so. Our
Lady's Tumbler stood on his head to please Our Lady. If St. Francis had
done the same thing, as he was quite capable of doing, it would
originally have been from the same motive; a motive of a purely
supernatural thought. It would be after this that his enthusiasm would
extend itself and give a sort of halo to the edges of all earthly
things. This is why it is not true to represent St. Francis as a mere
romantic forerunner of the Renaissance and a revival of natural
pleasures for their own sake. The whole point of him was that the secret
of recovering the natural pleasures lay in regarding them in the light
of a supernatural pleasure. In other words, he repeated in his own
person that historic process noted in the introductory chapter; the
vigil of asceticism which ends in the vision of a natural world made
new. But in the personal case there was even more than this; there were
elements that make the parallel of the Jongleur or Tumbler even more
appropriate than this.
It may be suspected that in that black cell or cave Francis passed the
blackest hours of his life. By nature he was the sort of man who has
that vanity which is the opposite of pride; that vanity which is very
near to humility. He never despised his fellow creatures and therefore
he never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures; including the
admiration of his fellow creatures. All that part of his human nature
had suffered the heaviest and most crushing blows. It is possible that
after his humiliating return from his frustrated military campaign he
was called a coward. It is certain that after his quarrel with his
father about the bales of cloth he was called a thief. And even those
who had sympathised most with him, the priest whose church he had
restored, the bishop whose blessing he had received, had evidently
treated him with an almost humorous amiability which left only too clear
the ultimate conclusion of the matter. He had made a fool of himself.
Any man who has been young, who has ridden horses or thought himself
ready for a fight, who has fancied himself as a troubadour and accepted
the conventions of comradeship, will appreciate the ponderous and
crushing weight of that simple phrase. The conversion of St. Francis,
like the conversion of St. Paul, involved his being in some sense flung
suddenly from a horse; but in a sense it was an even worse fall; for it
was a war-horse. Anyhow, there was not a rag of him left that was not
ridiculous. Everybody knew that at the best he had made a fool of
himself. It was a solid objective fact, like the stones in the road,
that he had made a fool of himself. He saw himself as an object, very
small and distinct like a fly walking on a clear window pane; and it was
unmistakably a fool. And as he stared at the word "fool" written in
luminous letters before him, the word itself began to shine and change.
We used to be told in the nursery that if a man were to bore a hole
through the centre of the earth and climb continually down and down,
there would come a moment at the centre when he would seem to be
climbing up and up. I do not know whether this is true. The reason I do
not know whether it is true is that I never happened to bore a hole
through the centre of the earth, still less to crawl through it. If I do
not know what this reversal or inversion feels like, it is because I
have never been there. And this also is an allegory. It is certain that
the writer, it is even possible that the reader, is an ordinary person
who has never been there. We cannot follow St. Francis to that final
spiritual overturn in which complete humiliation becomes complete
holiness or happiness, because we have never been there. I for one do
not profess to follow it any further than that first breaking down of
the romantic barricades of boyish vanity, which I have suggested in the
last paragraph. And even that paragraph, of course, is merely
conjectural, an individual guess at what he may have felt; but he may
have felt something quite different. But whatever else it was, it was so
far analogous to the story of the man making a tunnel through the earth
that it did mean a man going down and down until at some mysterious
moment he begins to go up and up. We have never gone up like that
because we have never gone down like that; we are obviously incapable of
saying that it does not happen; and the more candidly and calmly we read
human history, and especially the history of the wisest men, the more we
shall come to the conclusion that it does happen. Of the intrinsic
internal essence of the experience, I make no pretence of writing at
all. But the external effect of it, for the purpose of this narrative,
may be expressed by saying that when Francis came forth from his cave of
vision, he was wearing the same word "fool" as a feather in his cap; as
a crest or even a crown. He would go on being a fool; he would become
more and more of a fool; he would be the court fool of the King of
Paradise.
This state can only be represented in symbol; but the symbol of
inversion is true in another way. If a man saw the world upside down,
with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one
effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence. There is a Latin
and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging.
It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hung the
world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange
dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a
single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round.
But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry
of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high
citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was
turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and
more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the
psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as
before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered
even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep
roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a
new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being
merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would
be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be
thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to
be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so,
when he was crucified head-downwards.
It is commonly in a somewhat cynical sense that men have said, "Blessed
is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." It was
in a wholly happy and enthusiastic sense that St. Francis said, "Blessed
is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything." It was by
this deliberate idea of starting from zero, from the dark nothingness of
his own deserts, that he did come to enjoy even earthly things as few
people have enjoyed them; and they are in themselves the best working
example of the idea. For there is no way in which a man can earn a star
or deserve a sunset. But there is more than this involved, and more
indeed than is easily to be expressed in words. It is not only true that
the less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck
and of all the gifts of God. It is also true that he sees more of the
things themselves when he sees more of their origin; for their origin is
a part of them and indeed the most important part of them. Thus they
become more extraordinary by being explained. He has more wonder at them
but less fear of them; for a thing is really wonderful when it is
significant and not when it is insignificant; and a monster, shapeless
or dumb or merely destructive, may be larger than the mountains, but is
still in a literal sense insignificant. For a mystic like St. Francis
the monsters had a meaning; that is, they had delivered their message.
They spoke no longer in an unknown tongue. That is the meaning of all
those stories whether legendary or historical, in which he appears as a
magician speaking the language of beasts and birds. The mystic will have
nothing to do with mere mystery; mere mystery is generally a mystery of
iniquity.
The transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution;
by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes
one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather
like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady
looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him
of his lady. A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem
to say the same thing; but indeed though they would both be telling the
truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life
is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith. But one
effect of the difference is that the sense of a divine dependence, which
for the artist is like the brilliant levin-blaze, for the saint is like
the broad daylight. Being in some mystical sense on the other side of
things, he sees things go forth from the divine as children going forth
from a familiar and accepted home, instead of meeting them as they come
out, as most of us do, upon the roads of the world. And it is the
paradox that by this privilege he is more familiar, more free and
fraternal, more carelessly hospitable than we. For us the elements are
like heralds who tell us with trumpet and tabard that we are drawing
near the city of a great king; but he hails them with an old familiarity
that is almost an old frivolity. He calls them his Brother Fire and his
Sister Water.
So arises out of this almost nihilistic abyss the noble thing that is
called Praise; which no one will ever understand while he identifies it
with nature-worship or pantheistic optimism. When we say that a poet
praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the
whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the
sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from
nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal
image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and
mysterious name. The mystic who passes through the moment when there is
nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings
in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates
everything but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he
endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in
some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with
the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.
That is but a distant adumbration of the reason why the Franciscan,
ragged, penniless, homeless and apparently hopeless, did indeed come
forth singing such songs as might come from the stars of morning; and
shouting, a son of God.
This sense of the great gratitude and the sublime dependence was not a
phrase or even a sentiment; it is the whole point that this was the very
rock of reality. It was not a fancy but a fact; rather it is true that
beside it all facts are fancies. That we all depend in every detail, at
every instant, as a Christian would say upon God, as even an agnostic
would say upon existence and the nature of things, is not an illusion of
imagination; on the contrary, it is the fundamental fact which we cover
up, as with curtains, with the illusion of ordinary life. That ordinary
life is an admirable thing in itself, just as imagination is an
admirable thing in itself. But it is much more the ordinary life that is
made of imagination than the contemplative life. He who has seen the
whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth; we
might almost say the cold truth. He who has seen the vision of his city
upside-down has seen it the right way up.
Rossetti makes the remark somewhere, bitterly but with great truth, that
the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has
nobody to thank. The converse of this proposition is also true; and it
is certain that this gratitude produced, in such men as we are here
considering, the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.
The great painter boasted that he mixed all his colours with brains, and
the great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All
goods look better when they look like gifts. In this sense it is certain
that the mystical method establishes a very healthy external relation to
everything else. But it must always be remembered that everything else
has for ever fallen into a second place, in comparison with this simple
fact of dependence on the divine reality. In so far as ordinary social
relations have in them something that seems solid and self-supporting,
some sense of being at once buttressed and cushioned; in so far as they
establish sanity in the sense of security and security in the sense of
self-sufficiency, the man who has seen the world hanging on a hair does
have some difficulty in taking them so seriously as that. In so far as
even the secular authorities and hierarchies, even the most natural
superiorities and the most necessary subordinations, tend at once to put
a man in his place, and to make him sure of his position, the man who
has seen the human hierarchy upside down will always have something of a
smile for its superiorities. In this sense the direct vision of divine
reality does disturb solemnities that are sane enough in themselves. The
mystic may have added a cubit to his stature; but he generally loses
something of his status. He can no longer take himself for granted,
merely because he can verify his own existence in a parish register or a
family Bible. Such a man may have something of the appearance of the
lunatic who has lost his name while preserving his nature; who
straightway forgets what manner of man he was. "Hitherto I have called
Pietro Bernardone father; but now I am the servant of God."
All these profound matters must be suggested in short and imperfect
phrases; and the shortest statement of one aspect of this illumination
is to say that it is the discovery of an infinite debt. It may seem a
paradox to say that a man may be transported with joy to discover that
he is in debt. But this is only because in commercial cases the creditor
does not generally share the transports of joy; especially when the debt
is by hypothesis infinite and therefore unrecoverable. But here again
the parallel of a natural love-story of the nobler sort disposes of the
difficulty in a flash. There the infinite creditor does share the joy of
the infinite debtor; for indeed they are both debtors and both
creditors. In other words debt and dependence do become pleasures in the
presence of unspoilt love; the word is used too loosely and luxuriously
in popular simplifications like the present; but here the word is really
the key. It is the key of all the problems of Franciscan morality which
puzzle the merely modern mind; but above all it is the key of
asceticism. It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man
who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be for ever paying it. He
will be for ever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be
expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a
bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks. Men who think they are too modern
to understand this are in fact too mean to understand it; we are most of
us too mean to practise it. We are not generous enough to be ascetics;
one might almost say not genial enough to be ascetics. A man must have
magnanimity of surrender, of which he commonly only catches a glimpse in
first love, like a glimpse of our lost Eden. But whether he sees it or
not, the truth is in that riddle; that the whole world has, or is, only
one good thing; and it is a bad debt.
If ever that rarer sort of romantic love, which was the truth that
sustained the Troubadours, falls out of fashion and is treated as
fiction, we may see some such misunderstanding as that of the modern
world about asceticism. For it seems conceivable that some barbarians
might try to destroy chivalry in love, as the barbarians ruling in
Berlin destroyed chivalry in war. If that were ever so, we should have
the same sort of unintelligent sneers and unimaginative questions. Men
will ask what selfish sort of woman it must have been who ruthlessly
exacted tribute in the form of flowers, or what an avaricious creature
she can have been to demand solid gold in the form of a ring; just as
they ask what cruel kind of God can have demanded sacrifice and
self-denial. They will have lost the clue to all that lovers have meant
by love; and will not understand that it was because the thing was not
demanded that it was done. But whether or no any such lesser things will
throw a light on the greater, it is utterly useless to study a great
thing like the Franciscan movement while remaining in the modern mood
that murmurs against gloomy asceticism. The whole point about St.
Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly
was not gloomy. As soon as ever he had been unhorsed by the glorious
humiliation of his vision of dependence on the divine love, he flung
himself into fasting and vigil exactly as he had flung himself furiously
into battle. He had wheeled his charger clean round, but there was no
halt or check in the thundering impetuosity of his charge. There was
nothing negative about it; it was not a regimen or a stoical simplicity
of life. It was not self-denial merely in the sense of self-control. It
was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of being as positive as
a pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after
poverty as men have dug madly for gold. And it is precisely the positive
and passionate quality of this part of his personality that is a
challenge to the modern mind in the whole problem of the pursuit of
pleasure. There undeniably is the historical fact; and there attached to
it is another moral fact almost as undeniable. It is certain that he
held on this heroic or unnatural course from the moment when he went
forth in his hair-shirt into the winter woods to the moment when he
desired even in his death agony to lie bare upon the bare ground, to
prove that he had and that he was nothing. And we can say, with almost
as deep a certainty, that the stars which passed above that gaunt and
wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once, in all their
shining cycles round the world of labouring humanity, looked down upon a
happy man.
CHAPTER VI THE LITTLE POOR MAN
From that cavern, that was a furnace of glowing gratitude and humility,
there came forth one of the strongest and strangest and most original
personalities that human history has known. He was, among other things,
emphatically what we call a character; almost as we speak of a character
in a good novel or play. He was not only a humanist but a humourist; a
humourist especially in the old English sense of a man always in his
humour, going his own way and doing what nobody else would have done.
The anecdotes about him have a certain biographical quality of which the
most familiar example is Dr. Johnson; which belongs in another way to
William Blake or to Charles Lamb. The atmosphere can only be defined by
a sort of antithesis; the act is always unexpected and never
inappropriate. Before the thing is said or done it cannot even be
conjectured; but after it is said or done it is felt to be merely
characteristic. It is surprisingly and yet inevitably individual. This
quality of abrupt fitness and bewildering consistency belongs to St.
Francis in a way that marks him out from most men of his time. Men are
learning more and more of the solid social virtues of medieval
civilisation; but those impressions are still social rather than
individual. The medieval world was far ahead of the modern world in its
sense of the things in which all men are at one: death and the daylight
of reason and the common conscience that holds communities together. Its
generalisations were saner and sounder than the mad materialistic
theories of to-day; nobody would have tolerated a Schopenhauer scorning
life or a Nietzsche living only for scorn. But the modern world is more
subtle in its sense of the things in which men are not at one; in the
temperamental varieties and differentiations that make up the personal
problems of life. All men who can think themselves now realise that the
great schoolmen had a type of thought that was wonderfully clear; but it
was as it were deliberately colourless. All are now agreed that the
greatest art of the age was the art of public buildings; the popular and
communal art of architecture. But it was not an age for the art of
portrait-painting. Yet the friends of St. Francis have really contrived
to leave behind a portrait; something almost resembling a devout and
affectionate caricature. There are lines and colours in it that are
personal almost to the extent of being perverse, if one can use the word
perversity of an inversion that was also a conversion. Even among the
saints he has the air of a sort of eccentric, if one may use the word of
one whose eccentricity consisted in always turning towards the centre.
Before resuming the narrative of his first adventures, and the building
of the great brotherhood which was the beginning of so merciful a
revolution, I think it well to complete this imperfect personal portrait
here; and having attempted in the last chapter a tentative description
of the process, to add in this chapter a few touches to describe the
result. I mean by the result the real man as he was after his first
formative experiences; the man whom men met walking about on the Italian
roads in his brown tunic tied with a rope. For that man, saving the
grace of God, is the explanation of all that followed; men acted quite
differently according to whether they had met him or not. If we see
afterwards a vast tumult, an appeal to the Pope, mobs of men in brown
habits besieging the seats of authority, Papal pronouncements, heretical
sessions, trial and triumphant survival, the world full of a new
movement, the friar a household word in every corner of Europe, and if
we ask why all this happened, we can only approximate to any answer to
our own question if we can, in some faint and indirect imaginative
fashion, hear one human voice or see one human face under a hood. There
is no answer except that Francis Bernardone had happened; and we must
try in some sense to see what we should have seen if he had happened to
us. In other words, after some groping suggestions about his life from
the inside, we must again consider it from the outside; as if he were a
stranger coming up the road towards us, along the hills of Umbria,
between the olives or the vines.
Francis of Assisi was slight in figure with that sort of slightness
which, combined with so much vivacity, gives the impression of
smallness. He was probably taller than he looked; middle-sized, his
biographers say; he was certainly very active and, considering what he
went through, must have been tolerably tough. He was of the brownish
Southern colouring, with a dark beard thin and pointed such as appears
in pictures under the hoods of elves. And his eyes glowed with the fire
that fretted him night and day. There is something about the description
of all he said and did which suggests that, even more than most
Italians, he turned naturally to a passionate pantomime of gestures. If
this was so it is equally certain that with him, even more than with
most Italians, the gestures were all gestures of politeness or
hospitality. And both these facts, the vivacity and the courtesy, are
the outward signs of something that mark him out very distinctively from
many who might appear to be more of his kind than they really are. It is
truly said that Francis of Assisi was on of the founders of the medieval
drama, and therefore of the modern drama. He was the very reverse of a
theatrical person in the selfish sense; but for all that he was
pre-eminently a dramatic person. This side of him can best be suggested
by taking what is commonly regarded as a reposeful quality; what is
commonly described as a love of nature. We are compelled to use the
term; and it is entirely the wrong term.
St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of
nature was precisely what he was not. The phrase implies accepting the
material universe as a vague environment, a sort of sentimental
pantheism. In the romantic period of literature, in the age of Byron and
Scott, it was easy enough to imagine that a hermit in the ruins of a
chapel (preferably by moonlight) might find peace and a mild pleasure in
the harmony of solemn forests and silent stars, while he pondered over
some scroll or illuminated volume, about the liturgical nature of which
the author was a little vague. In short, the hermit might love nature as
a background. Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We
might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine
darkness out of which the divine love had called up every coloured
creature one by one. He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its
setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A
bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose,
though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. A bush could
stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as ready to welcome the
brigand as the bush.
In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees.
St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He
wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing, being a
child of God and therefore a brother or sister of man. But he did not
want to stand against a piece of stage scenery used merely as a
background, and inscribed in a general fashion: "Scene; a wood." In this
sense we might say that he was too dramatic for the drama. The scenery
would have come to life in his comedies; the walls would really have
spoken like Snout the Tinker and the trees would really have come
walking to Dunsinane. Everything would have been in the foreground; and
in that sense in the footlights. Everything would be in every sense a
character. This is the quality in which, as a poet, he is the very
opposite of a pantheist. He did not call nature his mother; he called a
particular donkey his brother or a particular sparrow his sister. If he
had called a pelican his aunt or an elephant his uncle as he might
possibly have done, e would still have meant that they were particular
creatures assigned by their Creator to particular places; not mere
expressions of the evolutionary energy of things. That is where his
mysticism is so close to the common sense of the child. A child has no
difficulty about understanding that God made the dog and the cat; though
he is well aware that the making of dogs and cats out of nothing is a
mysterious process beyond his own imagination. But no child would
understand what you meant if you mixed up the dog and the cat and
everything else into one monster with myriad legs and called it nature.
The child would resolutely refuse to make head or tail of any such
animal. St. Francis was a mystic, but he believed in mysticism and not
in mystification. As a mystic he was the mortal enemy of all those
mystics who melt away the edges of things and dissolve an entity into
its environment. He was a mystic of the daylight and the darkness; but
not a mystic of the twilight. He was the very contrary of that sort of
oriental visionary who is only a mystic because he is too much of a
sceptic to be a materialist. St. Francis was emphatically a realist,
using the word realist in its much more real medieval sense. In this
matter he really was akin to the best spirit of his age, which had just
won its victory over the nominalism of the twelfth century. In this
indeed there was something symbolic in the contemporary art and
decoration of his period; as in the art of heraldry. The Franciscan
birds and beasts were really rather like heraldic birds and beasts; not
in the sense of being fabulous animals but in the sense of being treated
as if they were facts, clear and positive and unaffected by the
illusions of atmosphere and perspective. In that sense he did see a bird
sable on a field azure or a sheep argent on a field vert. But the
heraldry of humility was richer than the heraldry of pride; for it saw
all these things that God had given as something more precious and
unique than the blazonry that princes and peers had only given to
themselves. Indeed out of the depths of that surrender it rose higher
than the highest titles of the feudal age; than the laurel of Ceasar or
the Iron Crown of Lombardy. It is an example of extremes that meet, that
the Little Poor Man, who had stripped himself of everything and named
himself as nothing, took the same title that has been the wild vaunt of
the vanity of the gorgeous Asiatic autocrat, and called himself the
Brother of the Sun and Moon.
This quality, of something outstanding and even startling in things as
St. Francis saw them, is here important as illustrating a character in
his own life. As he saw all things dramatically, so he himself was
always dramatic. We have to assume throughout, needless to say, that he
was a poet and can only be understood as a poet. But he had one poetic
privilege denied to most poets. In that respect indeed he might be
called the one happy poet among all the unhappy poets of the world. He
was a poet whose whole life was a poem. He was not so much a minstrel
merely singing his own songs as a dramatist capable of acting the whole
of his own play. The things he said were more imaginative than the
things he wrote. The things he did were more imaginative than the things
he said. His whole course through life was a series of scenes in which
he had a sort of perpetual luck in bringing things to a beautiful
crisis. To talk about the art of living has come to sound rather
artificial than artistic. But St. Francis did in a definite sense make
the very act of living an art, though it was an unpremeditated art. Many
of his acts will seem grotesque and puzzling to a rationalistic taste.
But they were always acts and not explanations; and they always meant
what he meant them to mean. The amazing vividness with which he stamped
himself on the memory and imagination of mankind is very largely due to
the fact that he was seen again and again under such dramatic
conditions. From the moment when he rent his robes and flung them at his
father's feet to the moment when he stretched himself in death on the
bare earth in the pattern of the cross, his life was made up of these
unconscious attitudes and unhesitating gestures. It would be easy to
fill page after page with examples; but I will here pursue the method
found convenient everywhere in this short sketch, and take one typical
example, dwelling on it with a little more detail than would be possible
in a catalogue, in the hope of making the meaning more clear. The
example taken here occurred in the last days of his life, but it refers
back in a rather curious fashion to the first; and rounds off the
remarkable unity of that romance of religion.
The phrase about his brotherhood with the sun and moon, and with the
water and the fire, occurs of course in his famous poem called the
Canticle of the Creatures or the Canticle of the Sun. He sang it
wandering in the meadows in the sunnier season of his own career, when
he was pouring upwards into the sky all the passions of a poet. It is a
supremely characteristic work, and much of St. Francis could be
reconstructed from that work alone. Though in some ways the thing is as
simple and straightforward as a ballad, there is a delicate instinct of
differentiation in it. Notice, for instance, the sense of sex in
inanimate things, which goes far beyond the arbitrary genders of a
grammar. It was not for nothing that he called fire his brother, fierce
and gay and strong, and water his sister, pure and clear and inviolate.
Remember that St. Francis was neither encumbered nor assisted by all
that Greek and Roman polytheism turned into allegory, which has been to
European poetry often an inspiration, too often a convention. Whether he
gained or lost by his contempt of learning, it never occurred to him to
connect Neptune and the nymphs with the water or Vulcan and the Cyclops
with the flame. This point exactly illustrates what has already been
suggested; that, so far from being a revival of paganism, the Franciscan
renascence was a sort of fresh start and first awakening after a
forgetfulness of paganism. Certainly it is responsible for a certain
freshness in the thing itself. Anyhow St. Francis was, as it were, the
founder of a new folk-lore; but he could distinguish his mermaids from
his mermen and his witches from his wizards. In short, he had to make
his own mythology; but he knew at a glance the goddesses from the gods.
This fanciful instinct for the sexes is not the only example of an
imaginative instinct of the kind. There is just the same quaint felicity
in the fact that he singles out the sun with a slightly more courtly
title besides that of brother; a phrase that one king might use of
another, corresponding to "Monsieur notre frere." It is like a faint
half ironic shadow of the shining primacy that it had held in the pagan
heavens. A bishop is said to have complained of a Nonconformist saying
Paul instead of Saint Paul; and to have added, "He might at least have
called him Mr. Paul." So St. Francis is free of all obligation to cry
out in praise or terror on the Lord God Apollo, but in his new nursery
heavens, he salutes him as Mr. Sun. Those are the things in which he has
a sort of inspired infancy, only to be paralleled in nursery tales.
Something of the same hazy but healthy awe makes the story of Br'er Fox
and Br'er Rabbit refer respectfully to Mr. Man.
This poem, full of the mirth of youth and the memories of childhood,
runs through his whole life like a refrain, and scraps of it turn up
continually in the ordinary habit of his talk. Perhaps the last
appearance of its special language was in an incident that has always
seemed to me intensely impressive, and is at any rate very illustrative
of the great manner and gesture of which I speak. Impressions of that
kind are a matter of imagination and in that sense of taste. It is idle
to argue about them; for it is the whole point of them that they have
passed beyond words; and even when they use words, seem to be completed
by some ritual movement like a blessing or a blow. So, in a supreme
example, there is something far past all exposition, something like the
sweeping movement and mighty shadow of a hand, darkening even the
darkness of Gethsemane; "Sleep on now, and take your rest..." Yet there
are people who have started to paraphrase and expand the story of the
Passion.
St. Francis was a dying man. We might say he was an old man, at the time
this typical incident occurred; but in fact he was only prematurely old;
for he was not fifty when he died, worn out with his fighting and
fasting life. But when he came down from the awful asceticism and more
awful revelation of Alverno, he was a broken man. As will be apparent
when these events are touched on in their turn, it was not only sickness
and bodily decay that may well have darkened his life; he had been
recently disappointed in his main mission to end the Crusades by the
conversion of Islam; he had been still more disappointed by the signs of
compromise and a more political or practical spirit in his own order; he
had spent his last energies in protest.
At this point he was told that he was going blind. If the faintest hint
has been given here of what St. Francis felt about the glory and
pageantry of earth and sky, about the heraldic shape and colour and
symbolism of birds and beasts and flowers, some notion may be formed of
what it meant to him to go blind. Yet the remedy might well have seemed
worse than the disease. The remedy, admittedly an uncertain remedy, was
to cauterise the eye, and that without any anaesthetic. In other words
it was to burn his living eyeballs with a red-hot iron. Many of the
tortures of martyrdom, which he envied in martyrology and sought vainly
in Syria, can have been no worse. When they took the brand from the
furnace, he rose as with an urbane gesture and spoke as to an invisible
presence: "Brother Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and useful; I
pray you be courteous with me."
If there be any such thing as the art of life, it seems to me that such
a moment was one of its masterpieces. Not too many poets has it been
given to remember their own poetry at such a moment, still less to live
one of their own poems. Even William Blake would have been disconcerted
if, while he was re-reading the noble lines, "Tiger, tiger, burning
bright," a large live Bengal tiger had put his head in at the window of
the cottage in Felpham, evidently with every intention of biting his
head off. He might have wavered before politely saluting it, above all
by calmly completing the recitation of the poem to the quadruped to whom
it was dedicated. Shelley, who wished to be a cloud or a leaf carried
before the wind, have been mildly surprised to find himself turning
slowly head over heels in mid-air a thousand feet above the sea. Even
Keats, knowing that his hold on life was a frail one, might have been
disturbed to discover that the true, the blushful Hippocrene of which he
had just partaken freely had indeed contained a drug, which really
ensured that he should cease upon the midnight with no pain. For Francis
there was no drug; and for Francis there was plenty of pain. But his
first thought was one of his first fancies from the songs of his youth.
He remembered the time when a flame was a flower, only the most glorious
and gaily coloured of the flowers in the garden of God; and when that
shining thing returned to him in the shape of an instrument of torture,
he hailed it from afar like an old friend, calling it by the nickname
which might most truly be called its Christian name.
That is only one incident out of a life of such incidents; and I have
selected it partly because it shows what is meant here by that shadow of
gesture there is in all his words, the dramatic gesture of the south;
and partly because its special reference to courtesy covers the next
fact to be noted. The popular instinct of St. Francis, and his perpetual
preoccupation with the idea of brotherhood, will be entirely
misunderstood if it is understood in the sense of what is often called
camaraderie; the backslapping sort of brotherhood. Frequently from the
enemies and too frequently from the friends of the democratic ideal,
there has come a notion that this note is necessary to that ideal. It is
assumed that equality means all men being equally uncivil, whereas it
obviously ought to mean all men being equally civil. Such people have
forgotten the very meaning and derivation of the word civility, if they
do not see that to be uncivil is to be uncivic. But anyhow that was not
the equality which Francis of Assisi encouraged; but an equality of the
opposite kind; it was a camaraderie actually founded on courtesy.
Even in that fairy borderland of his mere fancies about flowers and
animals and even inanimate things, he retained this permanent posture of
a sort of deference. A friend of mine said that somebody was the sort of
man who apologises to the cat. St. Francis really would have apologised
to the cat. When he was about to preach in a wood full of the chatter of
birds, he said, with a gentle gesture, "Little sisters, if you have now
had your say, it is time that I also should be heard." And all the birds
were silent; as I for one can very easily believe. In deference to my
special design of making matters intelligible to average modernity, I
have treated separately the subject of the miraculous powers that St.
Francis most certainly possessed.
But even apart from any miraculous powers, men of that magnetic sort,
with that intense interest in animals, often have an extraordinary power
over them. St. Francis's power was always exercised with this elaborate
politeness. Much of it was doubtless a sort of symbolic joke, a pious
pantomime intended to convey the vital distinction in his divine
mission, that he not only loved but reverenced God in all his creatures.
In this sense he had the air not only of apologising to the cat or to
the birds, but of apologising to a chair for sitting on it or to a table
for sitting down at it. Any one who had followed him through life merely
to laugh at him, as a sort of lovable lunatic, might easily have had an
impression as of a lunatic who bowed to every post or took off his hat
to every tree. This was all a part of his instinct for imaginative
gesture. He taught the world a large part of its lesson by a sort of
divine dumb alphabet. But if there was this ceremonial element even in
lighter or lesser matters, its significance became far more serious in
the serious work of his life, which was an appeal to humanity, or rather
to human beings.
I have said that St. Francis deliberately did not see the wood for the
trees. It is even more true that he deliberately did not see the mob for
the men. What distinguishes this very genuine democrat from any mere
demagogue is that he never either deceived or was deceived by the
illusion of mass-suggestion. Whatever his taste in monsters, he never
saw before him a many-headed beast. He only saw the image of God
multiplied but never monotonous. To him a man was always a man and did
not disappear in a dense crowd any more than in a desert. He honoured
all men; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave
him his extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the
beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers
crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those
brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was
really interested in him; in his own inner individual life from the
cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken
seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or
the names in some clerical document. Now for this particular moral and
religious idea there is no external expression except courtesy.
Exhortation does not express it, for it is not mere abstract enthusiasm;
beneficence does not express it, for it is not mere pity. It can only be
conveyed by a certain grand manner which may be called good manners. We
may say if we like that St. Francis, in the bare and barren simplicity
of his life, had clung to one rag of luxury; the manners of a court.
But whereas in a court there is one king and a hundred courtiers, in
this story there was one courtier, moving among a hundred kings. For he
treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings. And this was really and
truly the only attitude that will appeal to that part of man to which he
wished to appeal. It cannot be done by giving gold or even bread; for it
is a proverb that any reveller may fling largesse in mere scorn. It
cannot even be done by giving time and attention; for any number of
philanthropists and benevolent bureaucrats do such work with a scorn far
more cold and horrible in their hearts. No plans or proposals or
efficient rearrangements will give back to a broken man his self-respect
and sense of speaking with an equal. One gesture will do it.
With that gesture Francis of Assisi moved among men; and it was soon
found to have something in it of magic and to act, in a double sense,
like a charm. But it must always be conceived as a completely natural
gesture; for indeed it was almost a gesture of apology. He must be
imagined as moving thus swiftly through the world with a sort of
impetuous politeness; almost like the movement of a man who stumbles on
one knee half in haste and half in obeisance. The eager face under the
brown hood was that of a man always going somewhere, as if he followed
as well as watched the flight of the birds. And this sense of motion is
indeed the meaning of the whole revolution that he made; for the work
that has now to be described was of the nature of an earthquake or a
volcano, an explosion that drove outwards with dynamic energy the forces
stored up by ten centuries in the monastic fortress or arsenal and
scattered all its riches recklessly to the ends of the earth. In a
better sense than the antithesis commonly conveys, it is true to say
that what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis scattered; but in the
world of spiritual things what had been stored into the barns like grain
was scattered over the world as seed. The servants of God who had been a
besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were
filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of
that ever swelling host went a man singing; as simply he had sung that
morning in the winter woods, where he walked alone.
CHAPTER VII THE THREE ORDERS
There is undoubtedly a sense in which two is company and three is none;
there is also another sense in which three is company and four is none
as is proved by the procession of historic and fictitious figures moving
three deep the famous trios like the Three Musketeers or the Three
Soldiers of Kipling. But there is yet another and a different sense in
which four is company and three is none; if we use the word company in
the vaguer sense of a crowd or a mass. With the fourth man enters the
shadow of a mob; the group is no longer one of three individuals only
conceived individually. That shadow of the fourth man fell across the
little hermitage of the Portiuncula when a man named Egidio apparently a
poor workman was invited by St. Francis to enter. He mingled without
difficulty with the merchant and the canon who had already become the
companions of Francis; but with his coming an invisible line was
crossed; for it must have been felt by this time that the growth of that
small group had become potentially infinite, or at least that its
outline had become permanently indefinite. It may have been in the time
of that transition that Francis had another of his dreams full of
voices; but now the voices were a clamour of the tongues of all nations,
Frenchmen and Italians and English and Spanish and Germans, telling of
the glory of God each in his own tongue; a new Pentecost and a happier
Babel.
Before describing the first steps he took to regularise the growing
group, it is well to have a rough grasp of what he conceived that group
to be. He did not call his followers monks; and it is not clear, at this
time at least, that he even thought of them as monks. He called them by
a name which is generally rendered in English as the Friars Minor; but
we shall be much closer to the atmosphere of his own mind if we render
it almost literally as The Little Brothers. Presumably he was already
resolved, indeed, that they should take the three vows of poverty,
chastity and obedience which had always been the mark of a monk. But it
would seem that he was not so much afraid of the idea of a monk as of
the idea of an abbot. He was afraid that the great spiritual
magistracies which had given even to their holiest possessors at least a
sort of impersonal and corporate pride, would import an element of
pomposity that would spoil his extremely and almost extravagantly simple
version of the life of humility. But the supreme difference between his
discipline and the discipline of the old monastic system was concerned,
of course, with the idea that the monks were to become migratory and
almost nomadic instead of stationary. They were to mingle with the
world; and to this the more old-fashioned monk would naturally reply by
asking how they were to mingle with the world without becoming entangled
with the world. It was a much more real question than a loose
religiosity is likely to realise; but St. Francis had his answer to it,
of his own individual sort; and the interest of the problem is in that
highly individual answer.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life
which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts,
without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow
on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost
stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club
of stone. He said, "if we had any possessions, we should need weapons
and laws to defend them." That sentence is the clue to the whole policy
that he pursued. It rested upon a real piece of logic; and about that he
was never anything but logical. He was ready to own himself wrong about
anything else; but he was quite certain he was right about this
particular rule. He was only once seen angry; and that was when there
was talk of an exception to the rule.
His argument was this: that the dedicated man might go anywhere among
any kind of men, even the worst kind of men, so long as there was
nothing by which they could hold him. If he had any ties or needs like
ordinary men, he would become like ordinary men. St. Francis was the
last man in the world to think any the worse of ordinary men for being
ordinary. They had more affection and admiration from him than they are
ever likely to have again. But for his own particular purpose of
stirring up the world to a new spiritual enthusiasm, he saw with a
logical clarity that was quite reverse of fanatical or sentimental, that
friars must not become like ordinary men; that the salt must not lose
its savour even to turn into human nature's daily food. And the
difference between a friar and an ordinary man was really that a friar
was freer than an ordinary man. It was necessary that he should be free
from the cloister; but it was even more important that he should be free
from the world. It is perfectly sound common sense to say that there is
a sense in which the ordinary man cannot be free from the world; or
rather ought not to be free from the world. The feudal world in
particular was one labyrinthine system of dependence; but it was not
only the feudal world that went to make up the mediaeval world nor the
mediaeval world that went to make up the whole world; and the whole
world is full of this fact. Family life as much as feudal life is in its
nature a system of dependence. Modern trade unions as much as mediaeval
guilds are interdependent among themselves even in order to be
independent of others. In mediaeval as in modern life, even where these
limitations do exist for the sake of liberty, they have in them a
considerable element of luck. They are partly the result of
circumstances; sometimes the almost unavoidable result of circumstances.
So the twelfth century had been the age of vows; and there was something
of relative freedom in that feudal gesture of the vow; for no man asks
vows from slaves any more than from spades. Still, in practice, a man
rode to war in support of the ancient house of the Column or behind the
Great Dog of the Stairway largely because had been born in a certain
city or countryside. But no man need obey little Francis in the old
brown coat unless he chose. Even in his relations with his chosen leader
he was in one sense relatively free, compared with the world around him.
He was obedient but not dependent. And he was as free as the wind, he
was almost wildly free, in his relation to that world around him. The
world around him was, as has been noted, a network of feudal and family
and other forms of dependence. The whole idea of St. Francis was that
the Little Brothers should be like little fishes who could go freely in
and out of that net. They could do so precisely because they were small
fishes and in that sense even slippery fishes. There was nothing that
the world could hold them by; for the world catches us mostly by the
fringes of our garments, the futile externals of our lives. One of the
Franciscans says later, "A monk should own nothing but his harp";
meaning, I suppose, that he should value nothing but his song, the song
with which it was his business as a minstrel to serenade every castle
and cottage, the song of the joy of the Creator in his creation and the
beauty of the brotherhood of men. In imagining the life of this sort of
visionary vagabond, we May already get a glimpse also of the practical
side of that asceticism which puzzles those who think themselves
practical. A man had to be thin to pass always through the bars and out
of the cage; he had to travel light in order to ride so fast and so far.
It was the whole calculation, so to speak, of that innocent cunning,
that the world was to be outflanked and outwitted by him, and be
embarrassed about what to do with him. You could not threaten to starve
a man who was ever striving to fast. You could not ruin him and reduce
him to beggary, for he was already a beggar. There was a very lukewarm
satisfaction even in beating him with a stick, when he only indulged in
little leaps and cries of joy because indignity was his only dignity.
You could not put his head in a halter without the risk of putting it in
a halo.
But one distinction between the old Monks and the new friars counted
especially in the matter of practicality and especially of promptitude.
The old fraternities with their fixed habitations and enclosed existence
had the limitations of ordinary householders. However simply they lived
there must be a certain number of cells or a certain number of beds or
at least a certain cubic space for a certain number of brothers; their
numbers therefore depended on their land and building material. But
since a man could become a Franciscan by merely promising to take his
chance of eating berries in a lane or begging a crust from a kitchen, of
sleeping under a hedge or sitting patiently on a doorstep, there was no
economic reason why there should not be any number of such eccentric
enthusiasts within any short period of time. It must also be remembered
that the whole of this rapid development was full of a certain kind of
democratic optimism that really was part of the personal character of
St. Francis. His very asceticism was in one sense the height of
optimism. He demanded a great deal of human nature not because he
despised it but rather because he trusted it. He was expecting a very
great deal from the extraordinary men who followed him; but he was also
expecting a good deal from the ordinary men to whom he sent them. He
asked the laity for food as confidently as he asked the fraternity for
fasting. But he counted on the hospitality of humanity because he really
did regard every house as the house of a friend. He really did love and
honour ordinary men and ordinary things; indeed we may say that he only
sent out the extraordinary men to encourage men to be ordinary.
This paradox may be more exactly stated or explained when we come to
deal with the very interesting matter of the Third Order, which was
designed to assist ordinary men to be ordinary with an extraordinary
exultation. The point at issue at present is the audacity and simplicity
of the Franciscan plan for quartering its spiritual soldiery upon the
population; not by force but by persuasion, and even by the persuasion
of impotence. It was an act of confidence and therefore a compliment. It
was completely successful. It was an example of something that clung
about St. Francis always; a kind of tact that looked like luck because
it was as simple and direct as a thunderbolt. There are many examples in
his private relations of this sort of tactless tact; this surprise
effected by striking at the heart of the matter. It is said that a young
friar was suffering from a sort of sulks between morbidity and humility,
common enough in youth and hero-worship, in which he had got it into his
head that his hero hated or despised him. We can imagine how tactfully
social diplomatists would steer clear of scenes and excitements, how
cautiously psychologists would watch and handle such delicate cases.
Francis suddenly walked up to the young man, who was of course secretive
and silent as the grave, and said, "Be not troubled in your thoughts for
you are dear to me, and even among the number of those who are most
dear. You know that you are worthy of my friendship and society;
therefore come to me, in confidence, whensoever you will, and from
friendship learn faith." Exactly as he spoke to that morbid boy he spoke
to all mankind. He always went to the point; he always seemed at once
more right and more simple than the person he was speaking to. He seemed
at once to be laying open his guard and yet lunging at the heart.
Something in this attitude disarmed the world as it has never been
disarmed again. He was better than other men; he was a benefactor of
other men; and yet he was not hated. The world came into church by a
newer and nearer door; and by friendship it learnt faith.
It was while the little knot of people at the Portiuncula was still
small enough to gather in a small room that St. Francis resolved on his
first important and even sensational stroke. It is said that there were
only twelve Franciscans in the whole world when he decided to march, as
it were, on Rome and found a Franciscan order. It would seem that this
appeal to remote headquarters was not generally regarded as necessary;
possibly something could have been done in a secondary way under the
Bishop of Assisi and the local clergy. It would seem even more probable
that people thought it somewhat unnecessary to trouble the supreme
tribunal of Christendom about what a dozen chance men chose to call
themselves. But Francis was obstinate and as it were blind on this
point; and his brilliant blindness is exceedingly characteristic of him.
A man satisfied with small things, or even in love with small things, he
yet never felt quite as we do about the disproportion between small
things and large. He never saw things to scale in our sense, but with a
dizzy disproportion which makes the mind reel. Sometimes it seems merely
out of drawing like a gaily coloured medieval map; and then again it
seems to have escaped from everything like a short cut in the fourth
dimension. He is said to have made a journey to interview the Emperor,
throned among his armies under the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, to
intercede for the lives of certain little birds. He was quite capable of
facing fifty emperors to intercede for one bird. He started out with two
companions to convert the Mahometan world. He started out with eleven
companions to ask the Pope to make a new monastic world.
Innocent III, the great Pope, according to Bonaventura, was walking on
the terrace of St. John Lateran, doubtless revolving the great political
questions which troubled his reign, when there appeared abruptly before
him a person in peasant costume whom he took to be some sort of
shepherd. He appears to have got rid of the shepherd with all convenient
speed; possibly he formed the opinion that the shepherd was mad. Anyhow
he thought no more about it until, says the great Franciscan biographer,
he dreamed that night a strange dream. He fancied that he saw the whole
huge ancient temple of St. John Lateran, on whose high terraces he had
walked so securely, leaning horribly and crooked against the sky as if
all its domes and turrets were stooping before an earthquake Then he
looked again and saw that a human figure was holding it up like a living
caryatid; and the figure was that of the ragged shepherd or peasant from
whom he had turned away on the terrace. Whether this be a fact or a
figure it is a very true figure of the abrupt simplicity with which
Francis won the attention and the favour of Rome. His first friend seems
to have been the Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo who pleaded for the
Franciscan idea before a conclave of Cardinals summoned for the purpose.
It is interesting to note that the doubts thrown upon it seem to have
been chiefly doubts about whether the rule was not too hard for
humanity, for the Catholic Church is always on the watch against
excessive asceticism and its evils. Probably they meant, especially when
they said it was unduly hard, that it was unduly dangerous. For a
certain element that can only be called danger is what marks the
innovation as compared with older institutions of the kind. In one sense
indeed the friar was almost the opposite of the monk. The value of the
old monasticism had been that there was not only an ethical but an
economic repose. Out of that repose had come the works for which the
world will never be sufficiently grateful, the preservation of the
classics, the beginning of the Gothic, the schemes of science and
philosophies, the illuminated manuscripts and the coloured glass. The
whole point of a monk was that his economic affairs were settled for
good; he knew where he would get his supper, though it was a very plain
supper. But the whole point of a friar was that he did not know where he
would get his supper. There was always a possibility that he might get
no supper. There was an element of what would be called romance, as of
the gipsy or adventurer. But there was also an element of potential
tragedy, as of the tramp or the casual labourer. So the Cardinals of the
thirteenth century were filled with compassion, seeing a few men
entering of their own free will that estate to which the poor of the
twentieth century are daily driven by cold coercion and moved on by the
police.
Cardinal San Paolo seems to have argued more or less in this manner: it
may be a hard life, but after all it is the life apparently described as
ideal in the Gospel; make what compromises you think wise or humane
about that ideal; but do not commit yourselves to saying that men shall
not fulfil that ideal if they can. We shall see the importance of this
argument when we come to the whole of that higher aspect of the life of
St. Francis which may be called the imitation of Christ. The upshot of
the discussion was that the Pope gave his verbal approval to the project
and promised a more definite endorsement, if the movement should grow to
more considerable proportions. It is probable that Innocent, who was
himself a man of no ordinary mentality, had very little doubt that it
would do so; anyhow he was not left long in doubt before it did do so.
The next passage in the history of the order is simply the story of more
and more people flocking to its standard; and as has already been
remarked, once it had begun to grow, it could in its nature grow much
more quickly than any ordinary society requiring ordinary funds and
public buildings. Even the return of the twelve pioneers from their
papal audience seems to have been a sort of triumphal procession. In one
place in particular, it is said, the whole population of a town, men,
women and children, turned out, leaving their work and wealth and homes
exactly as they stood and begging to be taken into the army of God on
the spot. According to the story, it was on this occasion that St.
Francis first foreshadowed his idea of the Third Order which enabled men
to share in the movement without leaving the homes and habits of normal
humanity. For the moment it is most important to regard this story as
one example of the riot of conversion with which he was already filling
all the roads of Italy. It was a world of wandering; friars perpetually
coming and going in all the highways and byways, seeking to ensure that
any man who met one of them by chance should have a spiritual adventure.
The first Order of St. Francis had entered history.
This rough outline can only be rounded off here with some description of
the Second and Third Orders, though they were founded later and at
separate times. The former was an order for women and owed its
existence, of course, to the beautiful friendship of St. Francis and St.
Clare. There is no story about which even the most sympathetic critics
of another creed have been more bewildered and misleading. For there is
no story that more clearly turns on that simple test which I have taken
as crucial throughout this criticism. I mean that what is the matter
with these critics is that they will not believe that a heavenly love
can be as real as an earthly love. The moment it is treated as real,
like an earthly love, their whole riddle is easily resolved. A girl of
seventeen, named Clare and belonging to one of the noble families of
Assisi, was filled with an enthusiasm for the conventual life; and
Francis helped her to escape from her home and to take up the conventual
life. If we like to put it so, he helped her to elope into the cloister,
defying her parents as he had defied his father. Indeed the scene had
many of the elements of a regular romantic elopement; for she escaped
through a hole in the wall, fled through a wood and was received at
midnight by the light of torches. Even Mrs. Oliphant, in her fine and
delicate study of St. Francis, calls it "an incident which we can hardly
record with satisfaction."
Now about that incident I will here only say this. If it had really been
a romantic elopement and the girl had become a bride instead of a nun,
practically the whole modern world would have made her a heroine. If the
action of the Friar towards Clare had been the action of the Friar
towards Juliet, everybody would be sympathising with her exactly as they
sympathise with Juliet. It is not conclusive to say that Clare was only
seventeen. Juliet was only fourteen. Girls married and boys fought in
battles at such early ages in mediaeval times; and a girl of seventeen
in the thirteenth century was certainly old enough to know her own mind.
There cannot be the shadow of a doubt, for any sane person considering
subsequent events, that St. Clare did know her own mind. But the point
for the moment is that modern romanticism entirely encourages such
defiance of parents when it is done in the name of romantic love. For it
knows that romantic love is a reality, but it does not know that divine
love is a reality. There may have been something to be said for the
parents of Clare; there may have been something to be said for Peter
Bernardone. So there may have been a great deal to be said for the
Montagues or the Capulets; but the modern world does not want it said;
and does not say it. The fact is that as soon as we assume for a moment
as a hypothesis, what St. Francis and St. Clare assumed all the time as
an absolute, that there is a direct divine relation more glorious than
any romance, the story of St. Clare's elopement is simply a romance with
a happy ending; and St. Francis is the St. George or knight-errant who
gave it a happy ending. And seeing that some millions of men and women
have lived and died treating this relation as a reality, a man is not
much of a philosopher if he cannot even treat it as a hypothesis.
For the rest, we may at least assume that no friend of what is called
the emancipation of women will regret the revolt of St. Clare. She did
most truly, in the modern jargon, live her own life, the life that she
herself wanted to lead, as distinct from the life into which parental
commands and conventional arrangements would have forced her. She became
the foundress of a great feminine movement which still profoundly
affects the world; and her place is with the powerful women of history.
It is not clear that she would have been so great or so useful if she
had made a runaway match, or even stopped at home and made a mariage de
convenance. So much any sensible man may well say considering the matter
merely from the outside; and I have no intention of attempting to
consider it from the inside. If a man may well doubt whether he is
worthy to write a word about St. Francis, he will certainly want words
better than his own to speak of the friendship of St. Francis and St.
Clare. I have often remarked that the mysteries of this story are best
expressed symbolically in certain silent attitudes and actions. And I
know no better symbol than that found by the felicity of popular legend,
which says that one night the people of Assisi thought the trees and the
holy house were on fire, and rushed up to extinguish the conflagration.
But they found all quiet within, where St. Francis broke bread with St.
Clare at one of their rare meetings, and talked of the love of God. It
would be hard to find a more imaginative image, for some sort of utterly
pure and disembodied passion, than that red halo round the unconscious
figures on the hill; a flame feeding on nothing and setting the very air
on fire.
But if the Second Order was the memorial of such an unearthly love, the
Third Order was as solid a memorial of a very solid sympathy with
earthly loves and earthly lives. The whole of this feature in Catholic
life, the lay orders in touch with clerical orders, is very little
understood in Protestant countries and very little allowed for in
Protestant history. The vision which has been so faintly suggested in
these pages has never been confined to monks or even to friars. It has
been an inspiration to innumerable crowds of ordinary married men and
women; living lives like our own, only entirely different. That morning
glory which St. Francis spread over the earth and sky has lingered as a
secret sunshine under a multitude of roofs and in a multitude of rooms.
In societies like ours nothing is known of such a Franciscan following.
Nothing is known of such obscure followers; and if possible less is
known of the well-known followers. If we imagine passing us in the
street a pageant of the Third Order of St. Francis, the famous figures
would surprise us more than the strange ones. For us it would be like
the unmasking of some mighty secret society. There rides St. Louis, the
great king, lord of the higher justice whose scales hang crooked in
favour of the poor. There is Dante crowned with laurel, the poet who in
his life of passions sang the praises of the Lady Poverty, whose grey
garment is lined with purple and all glorious within. All sorts of great
names from the most recent and rationalistic centuries would stand
revealed; the great Galvani, for instance, the father of all
electricity, the magician who has made so many modern systems of stars
and sounds. So various a following would alone be enough to prove that
St. Francis had no lack of sympathy with normal men, if the whole of his
own life did not prove it.
But in fact his life did prove it, and that possibly in a more subtle
sense. There is, I fancy, some truth in the hint of one of his modern
biographers, that even his natural passions were singularly normal and
even noble, in the sense of turning towards things not unlawful in
themselves but only unlawful for him. Nobody ever lived of whom we could
less fitly use the word "regret" than Francis of Assisi. Though there
was much that was romantic, there was nothing in the least sentimental
about his mood. It was not melancholy enough for that. He was of far too
swift and rushing a temper to be troubled with doubts and
reconsiderations about the race he ran; though he had any amount of
self-reproach about not running faster. But it is true, one suspects,
that when he wrestled with the devil, as every man must to be worth
calling a man, the whispers referred mostly to those healthy instincts
that he would have approved for others; they bore no resemblance to that
ghastly painted paganism which sent its demoniac courtesans to plague
St. Anthony in the desert. If St. Francis had only pleased himself, it
would have been with simpler pleasures. He was moved to love rather than
lust, and by nothing wilder than wedding bells. It is suggested in that
strange story of how he defied the devil by making images in the snow,
and crying out that these sufficed him for a wife and family. It is
suggested in the saying he used when disclaiming any security from sin,
"I may yet have children"; almost as if it was of the children rather
than the woman that he dreamed. And this, if it be true, gives a final
touch to the truth about his character. There was so much about him of
the spirit of the morning, so much that was curiously young and clean,
that even what was bad in him was good. As it was said of others that
the light in their body was darkness, so it may be said of this luminous
spirit that the very shadows in his soul were of light. Evil itself
could not come to him save in the form of a forbidden good; and he could
only be tempted by a sacrament.
CHAPTER VIII THE MIRROR OF CHRIST
No man who has been given the freedom of the Faith is likely to fall
into those hole-and corner extravagances in which later degenerate
Franciscans, or rather Fraticelli, sought to concentrate entirely on St.
Francis as a second Christ, the creator of a new gospel. In fact any
such notion makes nonsense of every motive in the man's life; for no man
would reverently magnify what he was meant to rival, or only profess to
follow what he existed to supplant. On the contrary, as will appear
later, this little study would rather specially insist that it was
really the papal sagacity that saved the great Franciscan movement for
the whole world and the universal Church, and prevented it from petering
out as that sort of stale and second rate sect that is called a new
religion. Everything that is written here must be understood not only as
distinct from but diametrically opposed to the idolatry of the
Fraticelli. The difference between Christ and St. Francis was the
difference between the Creator and the creature; and certainly no
creature was ever so conscious of that colossal contrast as St. Francis
himself. But subject to this understanding, it is perfectly true and it
is vitally important that Christ was the pattern on which St. Francis
sought to fashion himself; and that at many points their human and
historical lives were even curiously coincident; and above all, that
compared to most of us at least St. Francis is a most sublime
approximation to his Master, and, even in being an intermediary and a
reflection, is a splendid and yet a merciful Mirror of Christ. And this
truth suggests another, which I think has hardly been noticed; but which
happens to be a highly forcible argument for the authority of Christ
being continuous in the Catholic Church.
Cardinal Newman wrote in his liveliest controversial work a sentence
that might be a model of what we mean by saying that his creed tends to
lucidity and logical courage. In speaking of the ease with which truth
may be made to look like its own shadow or sham, he said, "And if
Antichrist is like Christ, Christ I suppose is like Antichrist." Mere
religious sentiment might well be shocked at the end of the sentence;
but nobody could object to it except the logician who said that Ceasar
and Pompey were very much alike, especially Pompey. It may give a much
milder shock if I say here, what most of us have forgotten, that if St.
Francis was like Christ, Christ was to that extent like St. Francis. And
my present point is that it is really very enlightening to realise that
Christ was like St. Francis. What I mean is this; that if men find
certain riddles and hard sayings in the story of Galilee, and if they
find the answers to those riddles in the story of Assisi, it really does
show that a secret has been handed down in one religious tradition and
no other. It shows that the casket that was locked in Palestine can be
unlocked in Umbria; for the Church is the keeper of the keys.
Now in truth while it has always seemed natural to explain St. Francis
in the light of Christ, it has not occurred to many people to explain
Christ in the light of St. Francis. Perhaps the word "light" is not here
the proper metaphor; but the same truth is admitted in the accepted
metaphor of the mirror. St. Francis is the mirror of Christ rather as
the moon is the mirror of the sun. The moon is much smaller than the
sun, but it is also much nearer to us; and being less vivid it is more
visible. Exactly in the same sense St. Francis is nearer to us, and
being a mere man like ourselves is in that sense more imaginable. Being
necessarily less of a mystery, he does not, for us, so much open his
mouth in mysteries. Yet as a matter of fact, many minor things that seem
mysteries in the mouth of Christ would seem merely characteristic
paradoxes in the mouth of St. Francis. It seems natural to reread the
more remote incidents with the help of the more recent ones. It is a
truism to say that Christ lived before Christianity; and it follows that
as a historical figure. He is a figure in heathen history. I mean that
the medium in which He moved was not the medium of Christendom but of
the old pagan empire; and from that alone, not to mention the distance
of time, it follows that His circumstances are more alien to us than
those of an Italian monk such as we might meet even to-day. I suppose
the most authoritative commentary can hardly be certain of the current
or conventional weight of all His words or phrases; of which of them
would then have seemed a common allusion and which a strange fancy. This
archaic setting has left many of the sayings standing like hieroglyphics
and subject to many and peculiar individual interpretations. Yet it is
true of almost any of them that if we simply translate them into the
Umbrian dialect of the first Franciscans, they would seem like any other
part of the Franciscans story; doubtless in one sense fantastic, but
quite familiar. All sorts of critical controversies have revolved round
the passage which bids men consider the lilies of the field and copy
them in taking no thought for the morrow. The sceptic has alternated
between telling us to be true Christians and do it, and explaining that
it is impossible to do. When he is a communist as well as an atheist, he
is generally doubtful whether to blame us for preaching what is
impracticable or for not instantly putting it into practice. I am not
going to discuss here the point of ethics and economics; I merely remark
that even those who are puzzled at the saying of Christ would hardly
pause in accepting it as a saying of St. Francis. Nobody would be
surprised to find that he had said, "I beseech you, little brothers,
that you be as wise as Brother Daisy and Brother Dandelion; for never do
they lie awake thinking of to-morrow, yet they have gold crowns like
kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory." Even more
bitterness and bewilderment has arisen about the command to turn the
other cheek and to give the coat to the robber who has taken the cloak.
It is widely held to imply the wickedness of war among nations about
which, in itself, not a word seems to have been said. Taken thus
literally and universally, it much more clearly implies the wickedness
of all law and government. Yet there are many prosperous peacemakers who
are much more shocked at the idea of using the brute force of soldiers
against a powerful foreigner than they are at using the brute force of
policemen against a poor fellow-citizen. Here again I am content to
point out that the paradox becomes perfectly human and probable if
addressed by Francis to Franciscans. Nobody would be surprised to read
that Brother Juniper did then run after the thief that had stolen his
hood, beseeching him to take his gown also; for so St. Francis had
commanded him. Nobody would be surprised if St. Francis told a young
noble, about to be admitted to his company, that so far from pursuing a
brigand to recover his shoes, he ought to pursue him to make him a
present of his stockings. We may like or not the atmosphere these things
imply; but we know what atmosphere they do imply. We recognise a certain
note as natural and clear as the note of a bird; the note of St.
Francis. There is in it something of gentle mockery of the very idea of
possessions; something of a hope of disarming the enemy by generosity;
something of a humorous sense of bewildering the worldly with the
unexpected; something of the joy of carrying an enthusiastic conviction
to a logical extreme. But anyhow we have no difficulty in recognising it
if we have read any of the literature of the Little Brothers and the
movement that began in Assisi. It seems reasonable to infer that if it
was this spirit that made such strange things possible in Umbria, it was
the same spirit that made them possible in Palestine. If we hear the
same unmistakable note and sense the same indescribable savour in two
things at such a distance from each other, it seems natural to suppose
that the case that is more remote from our experience was like the case
that is closer to our experience. As the thing is explicable on the
assumption that Francis was speaking to Franciscans, it is not an
irrational explanation to suggest that Christ also was speaking to some
dedicated band that had much the same function as Franciscans. In other
words, it seems only natural to hold, as the Catholic Church has held,
that these counsels of perfection were part of a particular vocation to
astonish and awaken the world. But in any case it is important to note
that when we do find these particular features, with their seemingly
fantastic fitness, reappearing after more than a thousand years, we find
them produced by the same religious system which claims continuity and
authority from the scenes in which they first appeared. Any number of
philosophies will repeat the platitudes of Christianity. But it is the
ancient Church that can again startle the world with the paradoxes of
Christianity. Ubi Petrus ibi Franciscus.
But if we understand that it was truly under the inspiration of his
divine Master that St. Francis did these merely quaint or eccentric acts
of charity, we must understand that it was under the same inspiration
that he did acts of self-denial and austerity. It is clear that these
more or less playful parables of the love of men were conceived after a
close study of the Sermon on the Mount. But it is evident that he made
an even closer study of the silent sermon on that other mountain; the
mountain that was called Golgotha. Here again he was speaking the strict
historical truth, when he said that in fasting or suffering humiliation
he was but trying to do something of what Christ did; and here again it
seems probable that as the same truth appears at the two ends of a chain
of tradition, the tradition has preserved the truth. But the import of
this fact at the moment affects the next phase in the personal history
of the man himself.
For as it becomes clearer that his great communal scheme is an
accomplished fact and past the peril of an early collapse, as it becomes
evident that there already is such a thing as an Order of the Friars
Minor, this more individual and intense ambition of St. Francis emerges
more and more. So soon as he certainly has followers, he does not
compare himself with his followers, towards whom he might appear as a
master; he compares himself more and more with his Master, towards whom
he appears only as a servant. This, it may be said in passing, is one of
the moral and even practical conveniences of the ascetical privilege.
Every other sort of superiority may be superciliousness. But the saint
is never supercilious, for he is always by hypothesis in the presence of
a superior. The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood
without a god. But in any case the service to which St. Francis had
committed himself was one which, about this time, he conceived more and
more in terms of sacrifice and crucifixion. He was full of the sentiment
that he had not suffered enough to be worthy even to be a distant
follower of his suffering God. And this passage in his history may
really be roughly summarized as the Search for Martyrdom.
This was the ultimate idea in the remarkable business of his expedition
among the Saracens in Syria. There were indeed other elements in his
conception, which are worthy of more intelligent understanding than they
have often received. His idea, of course, was to bring the Crusades in a
double sense to their end; that is, to reach their conclusion and to
achieve their purpose. Only he wished to do it by conversion and not by
conquest; that is, by intellectual and not material means. The modern
mind is hard to please; and it generally calls the way of Godfrey
ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral
method unpractical, when it has just called any practical method
immoral. But the idea of St. Francis was far from being a fanatical or
necessarily even an unpractical idea; though perhaps he saw the problem
as rather too simple, lacking the learning of his great inheritor,
Raymond Lully, who understood more but has been quite as little
understood. The way he approached the matter was indeed highly personal
and peculiar; but that was true of almost everything he did. It was in
one way a simple idea, as most of his ideas were simple ideas. But it
was not a silly idea; there was a great deal to be said for it and it
might have succeeded. It was, of course, simply the idea that it is
better to create Christians than to destroy Moslems. If Islam had been
converted, the world would have been immeasurably more united and happy;
for one thing, three quarters of the wars of modern history would never
have taken place. It was not absurd to suppose that this might be
effected, without military force, by missionaries who were also martyrs.
The Church had conquered Europe in that way and may yet conquer Asia or
Africa in that way. But when all this is allowed for, there is still
another sense in which St. Francis was not thinking of Martyrdom as a
means to an end, but almost as an end in itself; in the sense that to
him the supreme end was to come closer to the example of Christ. Through
all his plunging and, restless days ran the refrain: I have not suffered
enough; I have not sacrificed enough; I am not yet worthy even of the
shadow of the crown of thorns. He wandered about the valleys of the
world looking for the hill that has the outline of a skull.
A little while before his final departure for the East a vast and
triumphant assembly of the whole order had been held near the
Portiuncula; and called the Assembly of the Straw Huts, from the manner
in which that mighty army encamped in the field. Tradition says that it
was on this occasion that St. Francis met St. Dominic for the first and
last time. It also says, what is probable enough, that the practical
spirit of the Spaniard was almost appalled at the devout
irresponsibility of the Italian, who had assembled such a crowd without
organising a commissariat. Dominic the Spaniard was, like nearly every
Spaniard, a man with the mind of a soldier. His charity took the
practical form of provision and preparation. But, apart from the
disputes about faith which such incidents open, he probably did not
understand in this case the power of mere popularity produced by mere
personality. In all his leaps in the dark, Francis had an extraordinary
faculty of falling on his feet. The whole countryside came down like a
landslide to provide food and drink for this sort of pious picnic.
Peasants brought waggons of wine and game; great nobles walked about
doing the work of footmen. It was a very real victory for the Franciscan
spirit of a reckless faith not only in God but in man. Of course there
is much doubt and dispute about the whole story and the whole relation
of Francis and Dominic; and the story of the Assembly of the Straw Huts
is told from the Franciscan side. But the alleged meeting is worth
mentioning, precisely because it was immediately before St. Francis set
forth on his bloodless crusade that he is said to have met St. Dominic,
who has been so much criticised for lending himself to a more bloody
one. There is no space in this little book to explain how St. Francis,
as much as St. Dominic, would ultimately have defended the defence of
Christian unity by arms. Indeed it would need a large book instead of a
little book to develop that point alone from its first principles. For
the modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration;
and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of
what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics
as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the
Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody
else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and
enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Athiest heresy.
And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of
the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of
his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded
on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple
as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really
think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of
property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not
really thought out their idea of property. But while it is probable that
St. Francis would have reluctantly agreed with St. Dominic that war for
the truth was right in the last resort, it is certain that St. Dominic
did enthusiastically agree with St. Francis that it was far better to
prevail by persuasion and enlightenment if it were possible. St. Dominic
devoted himself much more to persuading than to persecuting; but there
was a difference in the methods simply because there was a difference in
the men. About everything St. Francis did there was something that was
in a good sense childish, and even in a good sense wilful. He threw
himself into things abruptly, as if they had just occurred to him. He
made a dash for his Mediterranean enterprise with something of the air
of a schoolboy running away to sea.
In the first act of that attempt he characteristically distinguished
himself by becoming the Patron Saint of Stowaways. He never thought of
waiting for introductions or bargains or any of the considerable backing
that he already had from rich and responsible people. He simply saw a
boat and threw himself into it, as he threw himself into everything
else. It has all that air of running a race which makes his whole life
read like an escapade or even literally an escape. He lay like lumber
among the cargo, with one companion whom he had swept with him in his
rush; but the voyage was apparently unfortunate and erratic and ended in
an enforced return to Italy. Apparently it was after this first false
start that the great reunion took place at the Portiuncula, and between
this and the final Syrian journey there was also an attempt to meet the
Moslem menace by preaching to the Moors in Spain. In Spain indeed
several of the first Franciscans had already succeeded gloriously in
being martyred. But the great Francis still went about stretching out
his arms for such torments and desiring that agony in vain. No one would
have said more readily than he that he was probably less like Christ
than those others who had already found their Calvary; but the thing
remained with him like a secret; the strangest of the sorrows of man.
His later voyage was more successful, so far as arriving at the scene of
operations was concerned. He arrived at the headquarters of the Crusade
which was in front of the besieged city of Damietta, and went on in his
rapid and solitary fashion to seek the headquarters of the Saracens. He
succeeded in obtaining an interview with the Sultan; and it was at that
interview that he evidently offered, and as some say proceeded, to fling
himself into the fire as a divine ordeal, defying the Moslem religious
teachers to do the same. It is quite certain that he would have done so
at a moment's notice. Indeed throwing himself into the fire was hardly
more desperate, in any case, than throwing himself among the weapons and
tools of torture of a horde of fanatical Mahometans and asking them to
renounce Mahomet. It is said further that the Mahometan muftis showed
some coldness towards the proposed competition, and that one of them
quietly withdrew while it was under discussion; which would also appear
credible. But for whatever reason Francis evidently returned as freely
as he came. There may be something in the story of the individual
impression produced on the Sultan, which the narrator represents as a
sort of secret conversion. There may be something in the suggestion that
the holy man was unconsciously protected among half-barbarous Orientals
by the halo of sanctity that is supposed in such places to surround an
idiot. There is probably as much or more in the more generous
explanation of that graceful though capricious courtesy and compassion
which mingled with wilder things in the stately Soldans of the type and
tradition of Saladin. Finally, there is perhaps something in the
suggestion that the tale of St. Francis might be told as a sort of
ironic tragedy and comedy called The Man Who Could Not Get Killed. Men
liked him too much for himself to let him die for his faith; and the man
was received instead of the message. But all these are only converging
guesses at a great effort that is hard to judge, because it broke off
short like the beginnings of a great bridge that might have united East
and West, and remains one of the great might-have-beens of history.
Meanwhile the great movement in Italy was making giant strides. Backed
now by papal authority as well as popular enthusiasm, and creating a
kind of comradeship among all classes, it had started a riot of
reconstruction on all sides of religious and social life; and especially
began to express itself in that enthusiasm for building which is the
mark of all the resurrections of Western Europe. There had notably been
established at Bologna a magnificent mission house of the Friars Minor;
and a vast body of them and their sympathisers surrounded it with a
chorus of acclamation. Their unanimity had a strange interruption. One
man alone in that crowd was seen to turn and suddenly denounce the
building as if it had been a Babylonian temple; demanding indignantly
since when the Lady Poverty had thus been insulted with the luxury of
palaces. It was Francis, a wild figure, returned from his Eastern
Crusade; and it was the first and last time that he spoke in wrath to
his children.
A word must be said later about this serious division of sentiment and
policy, about which many Franciscans, and to some extent Francis
himself, parted company with the more moderate policy which ultimately
prevailed. At this point we need only note it as another shadow fallen
upon his spirit after his disappointment in the desert; and as in some
sense the prelude to the next phase of his career, which is the most
isolated and the most mysterious. It is true that everything about this
episode seems to be covered with some cloud of dispute, even including
its date; some writers putting it much earlier in the narrative than
this. But whether or no it was chronologically it was certainly
logically the culmination of the story, and may best be indicated here.
I say indicated for it must be a matter of little more than indication;
the thing being a mystery both in the higher moral and the more trivial
historical sense. Anyhow the conditions of the affair seem to have been
these. Francis and a young companion, in the course of their common
wandering, came past a great castle all lighted up with the festivities
attending a son of the house receiving the honour of knighthood. This
aristocratic mansion, which took its name from Monte Feltro, they
entered in their beautiful and casual fashion and began to give their
own sort of good news. There were some at least who listened to the
saint "as if he had been an angel of God"; among them a gentleman named
Orlando of Chiusi, who had great lands in Tuscany and who proceeded to
do St. Francis a singular and somewhat picturesque act of courtesy. He
gave him a mountain; a thing somewhat unique among the gifts of the
world. Presumably the Franciscan rule which forbade a man to accept
money had made no detailed provision about accepting mountains. Nor
indeed did St. Francis accept it save as he accepted everything, as a
temporary convenience rather than a personal possession; but he turned
it into a sort of refuge for the eremitical rather than the monastic
life; he retired there when he wished for a life of prayer and fasting
which he did not ask even his closest friends to follow. This was
Alverno of the Apennines, and upon its peak there rests for ever a dark
cloud that has a rim or halo of glory.
What it was exactly that happened there may never be known. The matter
has been, I believe, a subject of dispute among the most devout students
of the saintly life as well as between such students and others of the
more secular sort. It may be that St. Francis never spoke to a soul on
the subject; it would be highly characteristic, and it is certain in any
case that he said very little; I think he is only alleged to have spoken
of it to one man. Subject however to such truly sacred doubts, I will
confess that to me personally this one solitary and indirect report that
has come down to us reads very like the report of something real; of
some of those things that are more real than what we call daily
realities. Even something as it were double and bewildering about the
image seems to carry the impression of an experience shaking the senses;
as does the passage in Revelation about the supernatural creatures full
of eyes. It would seem that St. Francis beheld the heavens above him
occupied by a vast winged being like a seraph spread out like a cross.
There seems some mystery about whether the winged figure was itself
crucified or in the posture of crucifixion, or whether it merely
enclosed in its frame of wings some colossal crucifix. But it seems
clear that there was some question of the former impression; for St.
Bonaventura distinctly says that St. Francis doubted how a seraph could
be crucified, since those awful and ancient principalities were without
the infirmity of the Passion. St. Bonaventura suggests that the seeming
contradiction may have meant that St. Francis was to be crucified as a
spirit since he could not be crucified as a man; but whatever the
meaning of the vision, the general idea of it is very vivid and
overwhelming. St. Francis saw above him, filling the whole heavens, some
vast immemorial unthinkable power, ancient like the Ancient of Days,
whose calm men had conceived under the forms of winged bulls or
monstrous cherubim, and all that winged wonder was in pain like a
wounded bird. This seraphic suffering, it is said, pierced his soul with
a sword of grief and pity; it may be inferred that some sort of mounting
agony accompanied the ecstasy. Finally after some fashion the apocalypse
faded from the sky and the agony within subsided; and silence and the
natural air filled the morning twilight and settled slowly in the purple
chasms and cleft abysses of the Apennines. The head of the solitary
sank, amid all that relaxation and quiet in which time can drift by with
the sense of something ended and complete; and as he stared downwards,
he saw the marks of nails in his own hands.
CHAPTER IX MIRACLES AND DEATH
The tremendous story of the Stigmata of St. Francis, which was the end
of the last chapter, was in some sense the end of his life. In a logical
sense, it would have been the end even if it had happened at the
beginning. But truer traditions refer it to a later date and suggest
that his remaining days on the earth had something about them of the
lingering of a shadow. Whether St. Bonaventura was right in his hint
that St. Francis saw in that seraphic vision something almost like a
vast mirror of his own soul, that could at least suffer like an angel
though not like a god, or whether it expressed under an imagery more
primitive and colossal than common Christian art the primary paradox of
the death of God, it is evident from its traditional consequences that
it was meant for a crown and for a seal. It seems to have been after
seeing this vision that he began to go blind.
But the incident has another and much less important place in this rough
and limited outline. It is the natural occasion for considering briefly
and collectively all the facts or fables of another aspect of the life
of St. Francis; an aspect which is, I will not say more disputable, but
certainly more disputed. I mean all that mass of testimony and tradition
that concerns his miraculous powers and supernatural experiences, with
which it would have been easy to stud and bejewel every page of the
story; only that certain circumstances necessary to the conditions of
this narration make it better to gather, somewhat hastily, all such
jewels into a heap.
I have here adopted this course in order to make allowance for a
prejudice. It is indeed to a great extent a prejudice of the past; a
prejudice that is plainly disappearing in days of greater enlightenment,
and especially of a greater range of scientific experiment and
knowledge. But it is a prejudice that is still tenacious in many of an
older generation and still traditional in many of the younger. I mean,
of course, what used to be called the belief "that miracles do not
happen," as I think Matthew Arnold expressed it, in expressing the
standpoint of so many of our Victorian uncles and great-uncles. In other
words it was the remains of that sceptical simplification by which some
of the philosophers of the early eighteenth century had popularised the
impression (for a very short time) that we had discovered the
regulations of the cosmos like the works of a clock, of so very simple a
clock that it was possible to distinguish almost at a glance what could
or could not have happened in human experience. It should be remembered
that these real sceptics, of the golden age of scepticism, were quite as
scornful of the first fancies of science as of the lingering legends of
religion. Voltaire, when he was told that a fossil fish had been found
on the peaks of the Alps, laughed openly at the tale and said that some
fasting monk or hermit had dropped his fish-bones there; possibly in
order to effect another monkish fraud. Everybody knows by this time that
science has had its revenge on scepticism. The border between the
credible and the incredible has not only become once more as vague as in
any barbaric twilight; but the credible is obviously increasing and the
incredible shrinking. A man in Voltaire's time did not know what miracle
he would next have to throw up. A man in our time does not know what
miracle he will next have to swallow.
But long before these things had happened, in those days of my boyhood
when I first saw the figure of St. Francis far away in the distance and
drawing me even at that distance, in those Victorian days which did
seriously separate the virtues from the miracles of the saints---even in
those days I could not help feeling vaguely puzzled about how this
method could be applied to history. Even then I did not quite
understand, and even now I do not quite understand, on what principle
one is to pick and choose in the chronicles of the past which seem to be
all of a piece. All our knowledge of certain historical periods, and
notably of the whole medieval period, rests on certain connected
chronicles written by people who are some of them nameless and all of
them dead, who cannot in any case be cross-examined and cannot in some
cases be corroborated. I have never been quite clear about the nature of
the right by which historians accepted masses of detail from them as
definitely true, and suddenly denied their truthfulness when one detail
was preternatural. I do not complain of their being sceptics; I am
puzzled about why the sceptics are not more sceptical. I can understand
their saying that these details would never have been included in a
chronicle except by lunatics or liars; but in that case the only
inference is that the chronicle was written by liars or lunatics. They
will write for instance: "Monkish fanaticism found it easy to spread the
report that miracles were already being worked at the tomb of Thomas
Becket." Why should they not say equally well, "Monkish fanaticism found
it easy to spread the slander that four knights from King Henry's court
had assassinated Thomas Becket in the cathedral"? They would write
something like this: "The credulity of the age readily believed that
Joan of Arc had been inspired to point out the Dauphin although he was
in disguise." Why should they not write on the same principle: "The
credulity of the age was such as to suppose that an obscure peasant girl
could get an audience at the court of the Dauphin"? And so, in the
present case, when they tell us there is a wild story that St. Francis
flung himself into the fire and emerged scathless, upon what precise
principle are they forbidden to tell us of a wild story that St. Francis
flung himself into the camp of the ferocious Moslems and returned safe?
I only ask for information; for I do not see the rationale of the thing
myself. I will undertake to say there was not a word written of St.
Francis by any contemporary who was himself incapable of believing and
telling a miraculous story. Perhaps it is all monkish fables and there
never was any St. Francis or any St. Thomas Becket or any Joan of Arc.
This is undoubtedly a reductio ad absurdum; but it is a reductio ad
absurdum of the view which thought all miracles absurd.
And in abstract logic this method of selection would lead to the wildest
absurdities. An intrinsically incredible story could only mean that the
authority was unworthy of credit. It could not mean that other parts of
his story must be received with complete credulity. If somebody said he
had met a man in yellow trousers, who proceeded to jump down his own
throat, we should not exactly take our Bible oath or be burned at the
stake for the statement that he wore yellow trousers. If somebody
claimed to have gone up in a blue balloon and found that the moon was
made of green cheese, we should not exactly take an affidavit that the
balloon was blue any more than that the moon was green. And the really
logical conclusion from throwing doubts on all tales like the miracles
of St. Francis was to throw doubts on the existence of men like St.
Francis. And there really was a modern moment, a sort of high-water mark
of insane scepticism, when this sort of thing was really said or done.
People used to go about saying that there was no such person as St.
Patrick; which is every bit as much of a human and historical howler as
saying there was no such person as St. Francis. There was a time, for
instance, when the madness of mythological explanation had dissolved a
large part of solid history under the universal and luxuriant warmth and
radiance of the Sun-Myth. I believe that that particular sun has already
set, but there have been any number of moons and meteors to take its
place.
St. Francis, of course, would make a magnificent Sun-Myth. How could
anybody miss the chance of being a Sun-Myth when he is actually best
known by a song called The Canticle of the Sun? It is needless to point
out that the fire in Syria was the dawn in the East and the bleeding
wounds in Tuscany the sunset in the West. I could expound this theory at
considerable length; only, as so often happens to such fine theorists,
another and more promising theory occurs to me. I cannot think how
everybody, including myself, can have overlooked the fact that the whole
tale of St. Francis is of Totemistic origin. It is unquestionably a tale
that simply swarms with totems. The Franciscan woods are as full of them
as any Red Indian fable. Francis is made to call himself an ass, because
in the original mythos Francis was merely the name given to the real
four-footed donkey, afterwards vaguely evolved into a half-human god or
hero. And that, no doubt, is why I used to feel that the Brother Wolf
and Sister Bird of St. Francis were somehow like the Brer Fox and Sis
Cow of Uncle Remus. Some say there is an innocent stage of infancy in
which we do really believe that a cow talked or a fox made a tar baby.
Anyhow there is an innocent period of intellectual growth in which we do
sometimes really believe that St. Patrick was a Sun-Myth or St. Francis
a Totem. But for the most of us both those phases of paradise are past.
As I shall suggest in a moment, there is one sense in which we can for
practical purposes distinguish between probable and improbable things in
such a story. It is not so much a question of cosmic criticism about the
nature of the event as of literary criticism about the nature of the
story. Some stories are told much more seriously than others. But apart
from this, I shall not attempt here any definite differentiation between
them. I shall not do so for a practical reason affecting the utility of
the proceeding; I mean the fact that in a practical sense the whole of
this matter is again in the melting pot, from which many things may
emerge moulded into what rationalism would have called monsters. The
fixed points of faith and philosophy do indeed remain always the same.
Whether a man believes that fire in one case could fail to burn depends
on why he thinks it generally does burn. If it burns nine sticks out of
ten because it is its nature or doom to do so, then it will burn the
tenth stick as well. If it burns nine sticks because it is the will of
God that it should, then it might be the will of God that the tenth
should be unburned. Nobody can get behind that fundamental difference
about the reason of things; and it is as rational for a theist to
believe in miracles as for an atheist to disbelieve in them. In other
words there is only one intelligent reason why a man does not believe in
miracles and that is that he does believe in materialism. But these
fixed points of faith and philosophy are things for a theoretical work
and have no particular place here. And in the matter of history and
biography, which have their place here, nothing is fixed at all. The
world is in a welter of the possible and impossible, and nobody knows
what will be the next scientific hypothesis to support some ancient
superstition. Three-quarters of the miracles attributed to St. Francis
would already be explained by psychologists, not indeed as a Catholic
explains them, but as a materialist must necessarily refuse to explain
them. There is one whole department of the miracles of St. Francis; the
miracles of healing. What is the good of a superior sceptic throwing
them away as unthinkable, at the moment when faith-healing is already a
big booming Yankee business like Barnum's Show? There is another whole
department analogous to the tales of Christ "perceiving men's thoughts."
What is the use of censoring them and blacking them out because they are
marked "miracles," when thought reading is already a parlour game like
musical chairs? There is another whole department, to be studied
separately if such scientific study were possible, of the well-attested
wonders worked from his relics and fragmentary possessions. What is the
use of dismissing all that as inconceivable, when even these common
psychical parlour tricks turn perpetually upon touching some familiar
object or holding in the hand some personal possession? I do not
believe, of course, that these tricks are of the same type as the good
works of the saint; save perhaps in the sense of Diabolus simius Dei.
But it is not a question of what I believe and why, but of what the
sceptic disbelieves and why. And the moral for the practical biographer
and historian is that he must wait till things settle down a little
more, before he claims to disbelieve anything.
This being so he can choose between two courses; and not without some
hesitation, I have here chosen between them. The best and boldest course
would be to tell the whole story in a straightforward way, miracles and
all, as the original historians told it. And to this sane and simple
course the new historians will probably have to return. But it must be
remembered that this book is avowedly only an introduction to St.
Francis or the study of St. Francis. Those who need an introduction are
in their nature strangers. With them the object is to get them to listen
to St. Francis at all; and in doing so it is perfectly legitimate so to
arrange the order of the facts that the familiar come before the
unfamiliar and those they can at once understand before those they have
a difficulty in understanding. I should only be too thankful if this
thin and scratchy sketch contains a line or two that attracts men to
study St. Francis for themselves; and if they do study him for
themselves, they will soon find that the supernatural part of the story
seems quite as natural as the rest. But it was necessary that my outline
should be a merely human one, since I was only presenting his claim on
all humanity, including sceptical humanity. I therefore adopted the
alternative course, of showing first that nobody but a born fool could
fail to realise that Francis of Assisi was a very real historical human
being; and then summarising briefly in this chapter the superhuman
powers that were certainly a part of that history and humanity. It only
remains to say a few words about some distinctions that may reasonably
be observed in the matter by any man of any views; that he may not
confuse the point and climax of the saint's life with the fancies or
rumours that were really only the fringes of his reputation.
There is so immense a mass of legends and anecdotes about St. Francis of
Assisi, and there are so many admirable compilations that cover nearly
all of them, that I have been compelled within these narrow limits to
pursue a somewhat narrow policy; that of following one line of
explanation and only mentioning one anecdote here or there because it
illustrates that explanation. If this is true about all the legends and
stories, it is especially true about the miraculous legends and the
supernatural stories. If we were to take some stories as they stand, we
should receive a rather bewildered impression that the biography
contains more supernatural events than natural ones. Now it is clean
against Catholic tradition, co-incident in so many points with common
sense, to suppose that this is really the proportion of these things in
practical human life. Moreover, even considered as supernatural or
preternatural stories, they obviously fall into certain different
classes, not so much by our experience of miracles as by our experience
of stories. Some of them have the character of fairy stories in their
form even more than their incident. They are obviously tales told by the
fire to peasants or the children of peasants, under conditions in which
nobody thinks he is propounding a religious doctrine to be received or
rejected, but only rounding off a story in the most symmetrical way,
according to that sort of decorative scheme or pattern that runs through
all fairy stories. Others are obviously in their form most emphatically
evidence; that is they are testimony that is truth or lies; and it will
be very hard for any judge of human nature to think they are lies.
It is admitted that the story of the Stigmata is not a legend but can
only be a lie. I mean that it is certainly not a late legendary
accretion added afterwards to the fame of St. Francis; but is something
that started almost immediately with his earliest biographers. It is
practically necessary to suggest that it was a conspiracy; indeed there
has been some disposition to put the fraud upon the unfortunate Elias,
whom so many parties have been disposed to treat as a useful universal
villain. It has been said, indeed, that these early biographers, St.
Bonaventura and Celano and the Three Companions, though they declare
that St. Francis received the mystical wounds, do not say that they
themselves saw those wounds. I do not think this argument conclusive;
because it only arises out of the very nature of the narrative. The
Three Companions are not in any case making an affidavit; and therefore
none of the admitted parts of their story are in the form of an
affidavit. They are writing a chronicle of a comparatively impersonal
and very objective description. They do not say, "I saw St. Francis's
wounds"; they say, "St. Francis received wounds." But neither do they
say, "I saw St. Francis go into the Portiuncula"; they say, "St. Francis
went into the Portiuncula." But I still cannot understand why they
should be trusted as eye-witnesses about the one fact and not trusted as
eye-witnesses about the other. It is all of a piece; it would be a most
abrupt and abnormal interruption in their way of telling the story if
they suddenly began to curse and to swear, and give their names and
addresses, and take their oath that they themselves saw and verified the
physical facts in question. It seems to me, therefore, that this
particular discussion goes back to the general question I have already
mentioned; the question of why these chronicles should be credited at
all, if they are credited with abounding in the incredible. But that
again will probably be found to revert, in the last resort, to the mere
fact that some men cannot believe in miracles because they are
materialists. That is logical enough; but they are bound to deny the
preternatural as much in the testimony of a modern scientific professor
as in that of a medieval monkish chronicler. And there are plenty of
professors for them to contradict by this time.
But whatever may be thought of such supernaturalism in the comparatively
material and popular sense of supernatural acts, we shall miss the whole
point of St. Francis, especially of St. Francis after Alverno, if we do
not realise that he was living a supernatural life. And there is more
and more of such supernaturalism in his life as he approaches towards
his death. This element of the supernatural did not separate him from
the natural; for it was the whole point of his position that it united
him more perfectly to the natural. It did not make him dismal or
dehumanised; for it was the whole meaning of his message that such
mysticism makes a man cheerful and humane. But it was the whole point of
his position, and it was the whole meaning of his message, that the
power that did it was a supernatural power. If this simple distinction
were not apparent from the whole of his life, it would be difficult for
any one to miss it in reading the account of his death.
In a sense he may be said to have wandered as a dying man, just as he
had wandered as a living one. As it became more and more apparent that
his health was failing, he seems to have been carried from place to
place like a pageant of sickness or almost like a pageant of mortality.
He went to Rieti, to Nursia, perhaps to Naples, certainly to Cortona by
the lake of Perugia. But there is something profoundly pathetic, and
full of great problems, in the fact that at last, as it would seem, his
flame of life leapt up and his heart rejoiced when they saw afar off on
the Assisian hill the solemn pillars of the Portiuncula. He who had
become a vagabond for the sake of a vision, he who had denied himself
all sense of place and possession, he whose whole gospel and glory it
was to be homeless, received like a Parthian shot from nature, the sting
of the sense of home. He also had his maladie du clocher, his sickness
of the spire; though his spire was higher than ours. "Never," he cried
with the sudden energy of strong spirits in death, "never give up this
place. If you would go anywhere or make any pilgrimage, return always to
your home, for this is the holy house of God." And the procession passed
under the arches of his home; and he lay down on his bed and his
brethren gathered round him for the last long vigil. It seems to me no
moment for entering into the subsequent disputes about which successors
he blessed or in what form and with what significance. In that one
mighty moment he blessed us all.
After he had taken farewell of some of his nearest an especially some of
his oldest friends, he was lifted at his own request off his own rude
bed and laid on the bare ground; as some say clad only in a hair-shirt,
as he had first gone forth into the wintry woods from the presence of
his father. It was the final assertion of his great fixed idea; of
praise and thanks springing to their most towering height out of
nakedness and nothing. As he lay there we may be certain that his seared
and blinded eyes saw nothing but their object and their origin. We may
be sure that the soul, in its last inconceivable isolation, was face to
face with nothing less than God Incarnate and Christ Crucified. But for
the men standing around him there must have been other thoughts mingling
with these; and many memories must have gathered like ghosts in the
twilight, as that day wore on and that great darkness descended in which
we all lost a friend. For what lay dying there was not Dominic of the
Dogs of God, a leader in logical and controversial wars that could be
reduced to a plan and handed on like a plan; a master of a machine of
democratic discipline by which others could organise themselves. What
was passing from the world was a person; a poet; an outlook on life like
a light that was never after on sea or land; a thing not to be replaced
or repeated while the earth endures. It has been said that there was
only one Christian, who died on the cross; it is truer to say in this
sense that there was only one Franciscan, whose name was Francis. Huge
and happy as was the popular work he left behind him, there was
something that he could not leave behind, any more than a landscape
painter can leave his eyes in his will. It was an artist in life who was
here called to be an artist in death; and he had a better right than
Nero, his anti-type, to say Qualis artifexpereo. For Nero's life was
full of posing for the occasion like that of an actor; while the
Umbrian's had a natural and continuous grace like that of an athlete.
But St. Francis had better things to say and better things to think
about, and his thoughts were caught upwards where we cannot follow them,
in divine and dizzy heights to which death alone can lift us up.
Round about him stood the brethren in their brown habits, those that had
loved him even if they afterwards disputed with each other. There was
Bernard, his first friend, and Angelo, who had served as his secretary,
and Elias, his successor, whom tradition tried to turn into a sort of
Judas, but who seems to have been little worse than an official in the
wrong place. His tragedy was that he had a Franciscan habit without a
Franciscan heart, or at any rate with a very un-Franciscan head. But
though he made a bad Franciscan, he might have made a decent Dominican.
Anyhow, there is no reason to doubt that he loved Francis, for ruffians
and savages did that. Anyhow he stood among the rest as the hours passed
and the shadows lengthened in the house of the Portiuncula; and nobody
need think so ill of him as to suppose that his thoughts were then in
the tumultuous future, in the ambitions and controversies of his later
years.
A man might fancy that the birds must have known when it happened; and
made some motion in the evening sky. As they had once, according to the
tale, scattered to the four winds of heaven in the pattern of a cross at
his signal of dispersion, they might now have written in such dotted
lines a more awful augury across the sky. Hidden in the woods perhaps
were little cowering creatures never again to be so much noticed and
understood; and it has been said that animals are sometimes conscious of
things to which man, their spiritual superior, is for the moment blind.
We do not know whether any shiver passed through all the thieves and the
outcasts and the outlaws, to tell them what had happened to him who
never knew the nature of scorn.
But at least in the passages and porches of the Portiuncula there was a
sudden stillness, where all the brown figures stood like bronze statues;
for the stopping of the great heart that had not broken till it held the
world.
CHAPTER X THE TESTAMENT OF ST. FRANCIS
In one sense doubtless it is a sad irony that St. Francis, who all his
life had desired all men to agree, should have died amid increasing
disagreements. But we must not exaggerate this discord, as some have
done, so as to turn it into a mere defeat of all his ideals. There are
some who represent his work as having been merely ruined by the
wickedness of the world, or what they always assume to be the even
greater wickedness of the Church.
This little book is an essay on St. Francis and not on the Franciscan
Order, still less on the Catholic Church or the Papacy or the policy
pursued towards the extreme Franciscans or the Fraticelli. It is
therefore only necessary to note in a very few words what was the
general nature of the controversy that raged after the great saint's
death, and to some extent troubled the last days of his life. The
dominant detail was the interpretation of the vow of poverty, or the
refusal of all possessions. Nobody so far as I know ever proposed to
interfere with the vow of the individual friar that he would have no
individual possessions. Nobody, that is, proposed to interfere with his
negation of private property. But some Franciscans, invoking the
authority of Francis on their side, went further than this and further I
think than anybody else has ever gone. They proposed to abolish not only
private property but property. That is, they refused to be corporately
responsible for anything at all; for any buildings or stores or tools;
they refused to own them collectively even when they used them
collectively. It is perfectly true that many, especially among the first
supporters of this view, were men of a splendid and selfless spirit,
wholly devoted to the great saint's ideal. It is also perfectly true
that the Pope and the authorities of the Church did not think this
conception was a workable arrangement, and went so far in modifying it
as to set aside certain clauses in the great saint's will. But it is not
at all easy to see that it was a workable arrangement or even an
arrangement at all; for it was really a refusal to arrange anything.
Everybody knew of course that Franciscans were communists; but this was
not so much being a communist as being an anarchist. Surely upon any
argument somebody or something must be answerable for what happened to
or in or concerning a number of historic edifices and ordinary goods and
chattels. Many idealists of a socialistic sort, notably of the school of
Mr. Shaw or Mr. Wells, have treated this dispute as if it were merely a
case of the tyranny of wealthy and wicked pontiffs crushing the true
Christianity of Christian Socialists. But in truth this extreme ideal
was in a sense the very reverse of Socialist, or even social. Precisely
the thing which these enthusiasts refused was that social ownership on
which Socialism is built; what they primarily refused to do was what
Socialists primarily exist to do; to own legally in their corporate
capacity. Nor is it true that the tone of the Popes towards the
enthusiasts was merely harsh and hostile. The Pope maintained for a long
time a compromise which he had specially designed to meet their own
conscientious objections, a compromise by which the Papacy itself held
the property in a kind of trust for the owners who refused to touch it.
The truth is that this incident shows two things which are common enough
in Catholic history, but very little understood by the journalistic
history of industrial civilisation. It shows that the Saints were
sometimes great men when the Popes were small men. But it also shows
that great men are sometimes wrong when small men are right. And it will
be found, after all, very difficult for any candid and clear-headed
outsider to deny that the Pope was right, when he insisted that the
world was not made only for Franciscans.
For that was what was behind the quarrel. At the back of this particular
practical question there was something much larger and more momentous,
the stir and wind of which we can feel as we read the controversy. We
might go so far as to put the ultimate truth thus. St. Francis was so
great and original a man that he had something in him of what makes the
founder of a religion. Many of his followers were more or less ready, in
their hearts, to treat him as the founder of a religion. They were
willing to let the Franciscan spirit escape from Christendom as the
Christian spirit had escaped from Israel. They were willing to let it
eclipse Christendom as the Christian spirit had eclipsed Israel.
Francis, the fire that ran through the roads of Italy, was to be the
beginning of a conflagration in which the old Christian civilisation was
to be consumed. That was the point the Pope had to settle; whether
Christendom should absorb Francis or Francis Christendom. And he decided
rightly, apart from the duties of his place; for the Church could
include all that was good in the Franciscans and the Franciscans could
not include all that was good in the Church. There is one consideration
which, though sufficiently clear in the whole story, has not perhaps
been sufficiently noted, especially by those who cannot see the case for
a certain Catholic common sense larger even than Franciscan enthusiasm.
Yet it arises out of the very merits of the man whom they so rightly
admire. Francis of Assisi, as has been said again and again, was a poet;
that is, he was a person who could express his personality. Now it is
everywhere the mark of this sort of man that his very limitations make
him larger. He is what he is, not only by what he has, but in some
degree by what he has not. But the limits that make the lines of such a
personal portrait cannot be made the limits of all humanity. St. Francis
is a very strong example of this quality in the man of genius, that in
him even what is negative is positive, because it is part of a
character. An excellent example of what I mean may be found in his
attitude towards learning and scholarship. He ignored and in some degree
discouraged books and book-learning; and from his own point of view and
that of his own work in the world he was absolutely right. The whole
point of his message was to be so simple that the village idiot could
understand it. The whole point of his point of view was that it looked
out freshly upon a fresh world, that might have been made that morning.
Save for the great primal things, the Creation and the Story of Eden,
the first Christmas and the first Easter, the world had no history. But
is it desired or desirable that the whole Catholic Church should have no
history?
It is perhaps the chief suggestion of this book that St. Francis walked
the world like the Pardon of God. I mean that his appearance marked the
moment when men could be reconciled not only to God but to nature and,
most difficult of all, to themselves. For it marked the moment when all
the stale paganism that had poisoned the ancient world was at last
worked out of the social system. He opened the gates of the Dark Ages as
of a prison of purgatory, where men had cleansed themselves as hermits
in the desert or heroes in the barbarian wars. It was in fact his whole
function to tell men to start afresh and, in that sense, to tell them to
forget. If they were to turn over a new leaf and begin a fresh page with
the first large letters of the alphabet, simply drawn and brilliantly
coloured in the early mediaeval manner, it was clearly a part of that
particular childlike cheerfulness that they should paste down the old
page that was all black and bloody with horrid things. For instance, I
have already noted that there is not a trace in the poetry of this first
Italian poet of all that pagan mythology which lingered long after
paganism. The first Italian poet seems the only man in the world who has
never even heard of Virgil. This was exactly right for the special sense
in which he is the first Italian poet. It is quite right that he should
call a nightingale a nightingale, and not have its song spoilt or
saddened by the terrible tales of Itylus or Procne. In short, it is
really quite right and quite desirable that St. Francis should never
have heard of Virgil. But do we really desire that Dante should never
have heard of Virgil? Do we really desire that Dante should never have
read any pagan mythology? It has been truly said that the use that Dante
makes of such fables is altogether part of a deeper orthodoxy; that his
huge heathen fragments, his gigantic figures of Minos or of Charon, only
give a hint of some enormous natural religion behind all history and
from the first foreshadowing the Faith. It is well to have the Sybil as
well as David in the Dies Irae. That St. Francis would have burned all
the leaves of all the books of the Sybil, in exchange for one fresh leaf
from the nearest tree, is perfectly true; and perfectly proper to St.
Francis. But it is good to have the Dies Irae as well as the Canticle of
the Sun.
By this thesis, in short, the coming of St. Francis was like the birth
of a child in a dark house, lifting its doom; a child that grows up
unconscious of the tragedy and triumphs over it by his innocence. In him
it is necessarily not only innocence but ignorance. It is the essence of
the story that he should pluck at the green grass without knowing it
grows over a murdered man or climb the apple-tree without knowing it was
the gibbet of a suicide. It was such an amnesty and reconciliation that
the freshness of the Franciscan spirit brought to all the world. But it
does not follow that it ought to impose its ignorance on all the world.
And I think it would have tried to impose it on all the world. For some
Franciscans it would have seemed right that Franciscan poetry should
expel Benedictine prose. For the symbolic child it was quite rational.
It was right enough that for such a child the world should be a large
new nursery with blank white-washed walls, on which he could draw his
own pictures in chalk in the childish fashion, crude in outline and gay
in colour; the beginnings of all our art. It was right enough that to
him such a nursery should seem the most magnificent mansion of the
imagination of man. But in the Church of God are many mansions.
Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church. If the Franciscan
movement had turned into a new religion, it would after all have been a
narrow religion. In so far as it did turn here and there into a heresy,
it was a narrow heresy. It did what heresy always does; it set the mood
against the mind. The mood was indeed originally the good and glorious
mood of the great St. Francis, but it was not the whole mind of God or
even of man. And it is a fact that the mood itself degenerated, as the
mood turned into a monomania. A sect that came to be called the
Fraticelli declared themselves the true sons of St. Francis and broke
away from the compromises of Rome in favour of what they would have
called the complete programme of Assisi. In a very little while these
loose Franciscans began to look as ferocious as Flagellants. They
launched new and violent vetoes; they denounced marriage; that is, they
denounced mankind. In the name of the most human of saints they declared
war upon humanity. They did not perish particularly through being
persecuted; many of them were eventually persuaded; and the
unpersuadable rump of them that remained remained without producing
anything in the least calculated to remind anybody of the real St.
Francis. What was the matter with these people was that they were
mystics; mystics and nothing else but mystics; mystics and not
Catholics; mystics and not Christians; mystics and not men. They rotted
away because, in the most exact sense, they would not listen to reason.
And St. Francis, however wild and romantic his gyrations might appear to
many, always hung on to reason by one invisible and indestructible hair.
The great saint was sane; and with the very sound of the word sanity, as
at a deeper chord struck upon a harp, we come back to something that was
indeed deeper than everything about him that seemed an almost elvish
eccentricity. He was not a mere eccentric because he was always turning
towards the centre and heart of the maze; he took the queerest and most
zigzag short cuts through the wood, but he was always going home. He was
not only far too humble to be an heresiarch, but he was far too human to
desire to be an extremist, in the sense of an exile at the ends of the
earth. The sense of humour which salts all the stories of his escapades
alone prevented him from ever hardening into the solemnity of sectarian
self-righteousness. He was by nature ready to admit that he was wrong;
and if his followers had on some practical points to admit that he was
wrong, they only admitted that he was wrong in order to prove that he
was right. For it is they, his real followers, who have really proved
that he was right and even in transcending some of his negations have
triumphantly extended and interpreted his truth. The Franciscan order
did not fossilise or break off short like something of which the true
purpose has been frustrated by official tyranny or internal treason. It
was this, the central and orthodox trunk of it, that afterwards bore
fruit for the world. It counted among its sons Bonaventura, the great
mystic, and Bernardino, the popular preacher, who filled Italy with the
very beatific buffooneries of a Jongleur de Dieu. It counted Raymond
Lully with his strange learning and his large and daring plans for the
conversion of the world; a man intensely individual exactly as St.
Francis was intensely individual. It counted Roger Bacon, the first
naturalist whose experiments with light and water had all the luminous
quaintness that belongs to the beginnings of natural history; and whom
even the most material scientists have hailed as a father of science. It
is not merely true that these were great men who did great work for the
world; it is also true that they were a certain kind of men keeping the
spirit and savour of a certain kind of man, that we can recognise in
them a taste and tang of audacity and simplicity, and know them for the
sons of St. Francis.
For that is the full and final spirit in which we should turn to St.
Francis; in the spirit of thanks for what he has done. He was above all
things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving
which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of
assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a
grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory
of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the
praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing.
He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the mere fact
of existence if we realise that but for some strange mercy we should not
even exist. And something of that larger truth is repeated in a lesser
form in our own relations with so mighty a maker of history. He also is
a giver of things we could not have even thought of for ourselves; he
also is too great for anything but gratitude. From him came a whole
awakening of the world and a dawn in which all shapes and colours could
be seen anew. The mighty men of genius who made the Christian
civilisation that we know appear in history almost as his servants and
imitators. Before Dante was, he had given poetry to Italy; before St.
Louis ruled, he had risen as the tribune of the poor; and before Giotto
had painted the pictures, he had enacted the scenes. That great painter
who began the whole human inspiration of European painting had himself
gone to St. Francis to be inspired. It is said that when St. Francis
staged in his own simple fashion a Nativity Play of Bethlehem, with
kings and angels in the stiff and gay mediaeval garments and the golden
wigs that stood for haloes, a miracle was wrought full of the Franciscan
glory. The Holy Child was a wooden doll or bambino, and it was said that
he embraced it and that the image came to life in his arms. He assuredly
was not thinking of lesser things; but we may at least say that one
thing came to life in his arms; and that was the thing that we call the
drama. Save for his intense individual love of song, he did not perhaps
himself embody this spirit in any of these arts. He was the spirit that
was embodied. He was the spiritual essence and substance that walked the
world, before any one had seen these things in visible forms derived
from it: a wandering fire as if from nowhere, at which men more material
could light both torches and tapers. He was the soul of mediaeval
civilisation before it even found a body. Another and quite different
stream of spiritual inspiration derives largely from him; all that
reforming energy of mediaeval and modern times that goes to the burden
of Deus est Deus Pauperum. His abstract ardour for human beings was in a
multitude of just mediaeval laws against the pride and cruelty of
riches; it is to-day behind much that is loosely called Christian
Socialist and can more correctly be called Catholic Democrat. Neither on
the artistic nor the social side would anybody pretend that these things
would not have existed without him; yet it is strictly true to say that
we cannot now imagine them without him; since he has lived and changed
the world.
And something of that sense of impotence which was more than half his
power will descend on any one who knows what that inspiration has been
in history, and can only record it in a series of straggling and meagre
sentences. He will know something of what St. Francis meant by the great
and good debt that cannot be paid. He will feel at once the desire to
have done infinitely more and the futility of having done anything. He
will know what it is to stand under such a deluge of a dead man's
marvels, and have nothing in return to establish against it; to have
nothing to set up under the overhanging, overwhelming arches of such a
temple of time and eternity, but this brief candle burnt out so quickly
before his shrine.
THE END